ST32F4Discovery

I'm going to use the STM32F407VGT6TR chip for my IP Camera. It has built in Camera Interface allowing up to 54 MHz pixel clock. It has built in SD Card interface. It's fast. The chip costs near £7.00 which is more than I'd like, but I need the high end functionality.

Camera Interface is not a 'standard', there are 2 types:
MIPI CSI is Camera Serial Interface, sub-LVDS very low noise, very fast serial, good luck finding this anywhere, it is protected by MIPI, you won't easily find camera modules or chipsets that support it.
Parallel Camera Interface, this is appearing more but still rare. Try searching for ARM or Cortex with Camera Interface, try searching RS or Farnell or any supplier, see if you can get a list of ARM based chips with Camera Interface. Basically I had to go through lists, pull up datasheet and check for Camera Interface for each chip.

I got bored, so STM32F407VGT6TR may not be the cheapest available, it was the cheapest I found within my boredom threshold.

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ST produce fabulous little development platforms, ST32FxDiscovery, look them up, they are pin compatible, 1 per microprocessor family, packed with features and cheap, I bought and am using at ST32F4Discovery, £11.75 from Farnell. It has a built in 'ST-Link', which is ST hardware interface for programmin/debugging their chip sets. You can buy an ST-Link on it's own from Farnell for only £68.60!
I can use the ST32F4Discovery for development, then I can use it again in 'ST Link' mode with my own PCB design.

Ok, so ST32FxDiscovery is fabulous hardware, then you come to use it. ST do not like or support hobbyist, there is not enough profit margin in hobbyists, so they don't want to support them. The platform is for company development, not for hobbyists. There are tons of free software resources to attract companies, but they are all based around commercial IDEs, these are:

Altium: TASKING VX-Toolset: They won't actually give you a price for their IDE, you need to fill in a form then a salesman will contact you. A press release states pricing starts at $1,795.

Atolic: TrueSTUDIO: Supposedly there is a free lite version, but I couldn't find it, normal is pro for 995 Euros.

IAR: EWARM: Baseline $1295

Keil: MDK-ARM: Farnell, starts at £472.

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But there are ways, I have Eclipse IDE plus GCC setup using Google and Internet, in 1 evening I have a project that I can flash and debug on STM32F4Discovery, though it only flashes an LED.
ST have a nice utility called STM32CubeMX, you can visually configure what you want to do then it puts together software building blocks to give you a really good head start. Only problem, it supports only the IDEs already listed :-(
Atolic TrueSTUDIO is actually Eclipse plus GCC, so I am thinking that maybe I can create software that converts STM32CubeMX output for Atolic to work in my environment.

But basically I am playing with tools when I really want to be making an IP Camera. Ah well, another challenge :-)

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23/02/2015

Went well, got working tool chain, building and flashing ok, should be able to use Discovery as ST-Link for flashing my project, didn't do anything spectacular just variations on blinky.