I am new to Atmel and Microchip. I have on-going large project which is currently based on another vendor of ARM Cortex M4 MCU and another development framework.
I am researching the SAM ARM line of MCUs and respective firmware development tools with possibility to switch . ATSAME70-XPLD development board is surprisingly powerful for a development board.
Two parallel lines of the development tools are both looking promising but somewhat confusing to choose.
MPLAB X IDE with Harmony v.3 (which is now supporting SAM 32 bit MCUs) vs. Atmel Studio 7 with Atmel STUDIO on-line configurator ? Which framework is more robust, reliable and well maintained in relation to the SAM MCUs based on Cortex M4 and M7 ?
My project needs the following libraries / peripherals:
- RTC with external crystal,
- MicroSD card 4-bit SDIO interface (code examples?),
- SPI both master and slave, UART, I2C communications
- USB Device stack supporting Composite CDC and MSC classes (code examples?),
- extended usage of Timers for timed Interrupt events, generation of complex PWM waveforms, complemental outputs, chained (linked) synchronization of the generated Timer outputs
The main criteria - which are the most clean libraries and good documentation and code examples for the above listed tasks for SAM MCUs? The second criteria is how fast/easy would be migration of existing code from another ARM Cortex M4 vendor/framework. How well tested are their libraries for SAM MCUs ? MPLAB X only recently included support for SAM MCUs and Microchip does not provide information on what kind of library they use. Atmel tools use ASF4 library which seems to be well documented although it is also new.
Also which tools have embedded support for the Segger J-Link debugging probe ?
Please help
Sincerely
Vlad