St7

About 4 or perhaps 5 years ago there was an underlying technology change.

That is... the main micro that runs everything became obsoleted by its manufacturer. This meant that all the firmware across the entire product range needed to be moved to a new processor (muchos $).

As you can imagine, there was a lot of R&D, a lot of delay, a lot of faffing around, and a great wailing and gnashing of teeth over all this. It also took a long time.

The firmware needed to be modified to run on the new micro, and every single product needed to be modified - with new boards and supporting circuitry wrapped around the new micro.

This was all done, pretty much seemlessly to users, with toolkit changes, product changes, phased production changeover, a stock of the old micros in spare with careful inventory management. All up it took about 2 or maybe 2.5 years.

The marketing chaps were a bit worried in case there was an outbreak of cock-ups, in which case there would be a need to identify: "is this an old-generation product, or a new generation". The ST7 sticker means it is a new generation. You will be hard pressed, now, to find anything without that sticker.

It's a testament to GOOD ENGINEERING that the transition happened, it happened with no foul-ups, and EVERY SINGLE product in the range was modified without incident. Every single firmware load had to be ported to new hardware and tested, and toolkit had to support the new firmware versions. Every single product, and PCB had to be up-issued. Amazingly - it was all pulled off without a hitch, and until now (years later) nobody has really even noticed the stickers!

To the customers: you never even knew of the pain and suffering - the product range stayed in continuous manufacture with a seamless transition.

To my former engineering team who made it happen: Excellent job chaps - you pulled off a bloody miracle. You are bunch of heroes. All those weekly meetings and status checks, all that testing...

And to the marketing chaps: You can remove those stickers now, and have a very tiny cost-down.