STM32 are one of the most popular Cortex ARM devices on the market as they are with aggresive pricing and nice features. The semiconductor crisis hit ST as all other semiconductor vendors and STM32 disappeared from the market. Many customers have been left for more than year without MCus.
GigaDevices is well known Flash memory manufacturer, they have range of ARM Cortex M3, M4 devices which are pin to pin compatible with STM32 MCUs.
We check GD32 assembled on our STM32 boards and they work equal the only difference we notice is that GD32 lack two wires JTAG SWD interface and only support the full JTAG, which is not big issue.
All code we test run equal on both STM32 and GD32.
Happy New Year! Olimex team wish you health and best of luck in the new 2021. Let all troubles from 2020 go away!
Update on UK shipping:
Brexit brings some troubles for trade with UK. We stopped the shipping to UK on December 23 2020 as we didn’t know how to handle the orders when we are back on January 4th.
When we got back in office we had expected news: The couriers raised their prices with almost 50% due to the extra efforts around the new UK regulations, but this was just the beginning.
From January 1st 2021 all shipments to UK with value under GBP 135 must be with included charged VAT. For this purpose all online shops which ships to UK must register for UK customs EORI and UK VAT-ID. They have to charge the VAT at the time of shipping and to pay to UK government all collected VAT at the end of the month. The shipments above GBP 135 are shipped with export declaration and without VAT as for any other countries outside EU.
The big platforms like Amazon, ebay etc. also need to register (probably they already did) and collect the VAT from their sellers.
We still not have EORI neither UK VAT-ID so we can’t ship small orders. Orders above EUR 200 are processed normally. We are sorry for this inconvenience and apologise to all our small UK customers.
Update on current boards:
iMX8Qmax board high speed signals are completely routed, we now make the connector arrangements on the PCB and hope to be ready for prototypes in March.
S3-OLinuXino revision B of the board prototypes works great. Bootlin reported that their mainline driver for CSI2 work with RaspberryPi IMX219 8 Mpix camera, CSI1 is with OV2640 2Mpix camera connector. Gigabit ethernet, Audio microphone, PoE option, eMMC/SPI Flash option, etc all are tested and work fine. We are making now final touch ups and will run production.
STMP1-SOM small module with STM32MP151/3/7 is on prototype Revision B and everything exept the Audio is working fine. Production will follow in March.
STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2 is stuck at Gigabit Ethernet. We had many other issues which were solved, but this remains. The original ST design uses RTL8211 which is commercial grade, we put KSZ9031RNXIC-TR instead and there is neither correctly sent neither correctly received package. We use this chip in Allwinner A20 and A64 designs without problems. We used all combinations of delays of the clocks and singnals etc with no luck. Our guess is the port hardware drivers are somehow incompatible with this PHY and are either slow either make rings which confuse the PHY chip. If someone has more knowledge and can help, we can send board.
olimex 
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