New STM32F4 Discovery Boards

I am a big fan of ST Micro’s STM32 Discovery boards. They are usually low-cost, often under 10 (GBP), and usually go beyond buttons and LEDs to include fun chips like accelerometers, gyroscopes, e-compasses, MEMS microphone, audio-codec, and speaker or headphone amplifiers.

ST Micros has announced two new Discovery boards at the same time as announcing volume shipment of new members of the STM32F4 family of microcontrollers.

The 32F401CDISCOVERY has a new low-end STM32F4. The MCU is a STM32F401VCT6 which runs at 80MHz, and has 256 KB of Flash memory and 64 KB of RAM in a 100pin package. The board has 3-axis digital  gyroscope, 3D digital accelerometer, 3D digital compass, omnidirectional digital microphone, and audio DAC with speaker amp, as well as four user LEDs and two pushbuttons. So this looks like tremendous fun! Future Electronics are listing it at $15 (USD), though they have no stock, so this price may change.

The 32F429IDISCOVERY has a new high-end STM32F4. The MCU is a STM32F429ZIT6 which runs at 180MHz, and has 2 MB of Flash memory, 256 KB of RAM in a 144pin package. The board adds 8MiB RAM, 2.4″ QVGA TFT LCD,  3-axis digital gyroscope, and a couple of user LEDs and buttons. ST are listing it at $24 (USD), but I haven’t found distributers listing it.

I remember our DEC Vax 750 (Systime 8750) only had 4MB memory, ran BSD UNIX, with a clock speed of a few MHz, and supported about a dozen users. IIRC it cost about £60,000 (in 1983)! So that 32F429IDISCOVERY would be quite a lot of computer for under £20.

One of the good things about the STM32 Discovery boards is they have hardware debuggers. Those boards have a cut down ST-LINK/V2, which provides hardware debugging for the STM32 on the same Discovery boards, and can also be used to debug the MCU on our own STM32 boards. So we can get off the ground, developing our own hardware, for less than the cost of an Arduino UNO. Of course, price isn’t the only criteria, Arduino does give us an easy to use IDE with libraries and examples, an amazing, supportive, community, a wide variety of compatible hardware, and Open Source hardware and software.

The ST-LINK.V2 will work with gdb. I’ve had success on my Mac using the Open Source ST-LINK server at github.com/texane/stlink which also provides a free-standing application for program upload. Windows users have other choices from ST directly, and the tools vendors have have support. So one option is to use a free version of e.g. Keil, which friends at Micromouse have used.

Now that ARM is supporting gcc and the gnu tools directly, through GNU Tools for ARM Embedded Processors, there is a relatively straightforward, free toolchain available for anyone to get hacking. Of course, those same tools work on my Orone-mini boards, as well as LeafLab’s Maple boards. There is some work on the LeafLabs Arduino compatible IDE going on too, So there may be an even easier path to using those boards in the future.