I'm speaking from experience, I built two boards with the rp2040 before I decided to stop using it.
The pin flexibility is nice, I agree with you there. But I spend more time dealing with the flash chip than that saves me.
I don't want more capability. An STM32 M3 has far far more processing throughput than I need for 99.9% of what I do. I want the smaller thing, even if it isn't cheaper. It is sufficient.
The rp2040 is not set up to easily let you do minimalist stuff like that. And after all, why would they go to the trouble? You have 16MB of flash to waste on library code you never call... it's like buying a mack truck to commute to work.
I'll also echo the other comment about the cache: if you actually have megabytes of .text, you're gonna have a bad time.
It takes more time than doing nothing, so it's a waste of time unless I require it.
Obviously it's usable that way, I said it wasn't as simple (the hardware is more complex to initialize).
Using "megabytes of space" for "trial boots" sounds like a rube goldberg machine that would cause more problems than it would ever solve on a chip you can't OTA, but feel free to argue with me :)
Why are the STM32 ring oscillators any different than the one in the RP2040? (If you mean crystal-free USB FS - yeah, that's a nice little feature, but this is the only difference that I am aware of.)
The pin flexibility is nice, I agree with you there. But I spend more time dealing with the flash chip than that saves me.
I don't want more capability. An STM32 M3 has far far more processing throughput than I need for 99.9% of what I do. I want the smaller thing, even if it isn't cheaper. It is sufficient.
I love stm32s because I can write bare metal C without using any of stmicro's libraries at all (except the one header defining the register offsets). Here's an example: https://github.com/jcalvinowens/ledboard/blob/master/firmwar...
The rp2040 is not set up to easily let you do minimalist stuff like that. And after all, why would they go to the trouble? You have 16MB of flash to waste on library code you never call... it's like buying a mack truck to commute to work.
I'll also echo the other comment about the cache: if you actually have megabytes of .text, you're gonna have a bad time.