Hi everyone,
I’m working in a young biotech company developing a scientific instrument for supporting its technology. I write a post on this forum for having your opinion on some choices that are offered to us at this early stage of the development of the apparatus firmware.
Our system has quite a lot of sensors and actuators to manage. The associated calculation is not really heavy but still quite significant. We will probably use USB interface for exchanging informations with a workstation. We also need to couple an HMI to our microcontroller, we plan to use a 800*480 LCD-TFT touscreen. We have chosen a STM32F746NGH6 microcontroller for our system as it has enough power and I/O for managing all of our peripherals including the touchscreen.
Two questions come to us at this point for the software:
-What do you think of using the TouchGFX engine for driving our HMI ?
-Is the use of an RTOS like FreeRTOS interesting for managing all microcontroller routines ?
Please tell me if I need to give you more details about the hardware.
Thanks,
Antoine

 

Bienvenue. Welcome to AAC!

The software you choose largely depends on the MCU and the manufacturer that you select.
ST Microelectronics has STM32F746G-DISCO development kit which will get you started quickly if that is the form factor you desire. Along with that it has STM32CubeIDE and TouchGFX.

That would be my choice for starters.

 

Hello , thanks for your reply.
I have already acquired this development board. I have read TouchGFX documentation and they suggest to use an RTOS like freeRTOS for managing the task associated with TouchGFX. Also I do not know if I can rely or not on TouchGFX for my application, that's why I'm asking thie opnion of the people who have experience with these tools.

 

You are wading into somewhat specific and advanced application.

TouchGFX and RTOS are very finicky things to get working. This is almost true for any advanced system. In that regard there is not a lot of professional assistance out there (unlike popular platforms such as Arduino).

You would not know until you give it a try. With any new platform you have to be prepared to spend some time learning the idiosyncrasies and just getting things to work. Bonne Chance!

 

Thank you very much, bonne journée !