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I am looking for a board, and think that I need someone to say that they have used it, rather than googling for it. In the immortal words of Jimi "are you experienced?"

I would like to program in Ada, so the STM32 looks ideal (I am also aware that the BBC micro:bit has good Ada support, but ...) I would like a board with a display, and, importantly, I want to the the PlatformIO IDE's debugger (or similar), to enable me to set breakpoints, examine variables, view the stack, etc, rather than just print to the serial monitor, so I need a board that supports the Platform Unified Debugger (or similar).

I am particularly interested in the STM32WB series as they have Bluetooth 5, which has some neat additions for proximity detection and I am currently contemplating a system to track people indoors in aan office/industrial setting.

They also support Zigbee, which is great for a "mesh of sensors" project that is bubbling up my list of "ToDo" projects.

Does anyone have experience of processors which would fill my needs?

To help you to answer, and to help me to order my thoughts, here's a preferential list of features:

  • good Ada support, with debugger
  • Bluetooth support (preferably BT 5, but I can live with 4 (LE))
  • preferably no JTAG required
  • display
  • wifi support
  • documentation/forums/examples/tutorials
  • battery life
  • good assortment of hats/shields (Grove connector would be nice)

[Update] I have been using the BBC micor:bit, but would sill love to find an STM32 with on-board Display and WiFi/BLE(5)

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    Hi Mawg, just wanted to let you know I rejected your tag excerpt for [ada] because it was just the excerpt from Wikipedia. It's great to have an excerpt for tags, but it's better to have it tailored to this site rather than a generic description. Do feel free to have another go at an excerpt though, it's great to make an excerpt for any new tags you create. Thanks!
    – Aurora0001
    Aug 20, 2019 at 9:38
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    Thanks for the heads up. Curiously I have created dozens of tags elsewhere just using the Wikipedia definition, but I am quite happy to have a crack at defining my own.
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Aug 21, 2019 at 12:51
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    No problem. Using the Wikipedia definition could be fine in limited circumstances, but probably falls under the reject reason "Simply defining what a [tag] is rarely helps those using it unless the tag's name itself is ambiguous. Excerpts should describe why and when a tag should be used. See the help center for more guidance.". We also can't accept copied content that could be a copyright violation, so usually Wikipedia copies should be rejected (although evidently that doesn't happen all the time!). Hope this clarifies things.
    – Aurora0001
    Aug 23, 2019 at 14:38
  • I gave it another try. Feel free to edit my humble attempt to be more informative than Wikipedia :-)
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Aug 24, 2019 at 7:19
  • Looks like my tag was accepted. A pity that the question was held, but I guess that H/W recs has its won site. Anyhoo, the BBC micro:bit, which not an ESP32 has good Ada support, plus it has an on-board debugger, so that no JTAG probe is necessary
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Sep 9, 2019 at 8:37

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