EEVblog

Dave takes a look at the ST STM32 L1 series low power ARM chips, and gets a cheap STM32L152C development board up and running with the IAR Embedded workbench compiler and STLINK/V2 interface.
Also a look at the STMcubeMX code initialisation application.
amzn.to/29CrU47
32L152CDISCOVERY bit.ly/29wtzqH
Schematic & User Manual: bit.ly/2aaEXWo
System Workbench for STM32
bit.ly/29TikGi
PIC32MX: www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/...
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[@malgailany]

I'm impressed of how fast you managed to find you way to makeup things go-up and running for the first time. It took me days to figure out thing properly when I started using STM32 MCUs two years ago. Nice video, thanks.

[@squelchedotter]

I was looking into this thing a year ago, but nothing became of it, glad you made this video!

[@EricWilliamsNeu]

We briefly used EWARM at work and the license was on a dongle. This was within the past few years. It was actually nice to be able to transfer license from person to person.

[@ChrisLeeX]

love your enthusiasm, got me excited for ARM

[@Aemilindore]

I use Texas Instruments Tiva based Launchpads! They have been treating me superbly awesome.

[@camthemanis2kool]

The TI forums are super helpful as well. Replies from their experts within 24 hours

[@IanGeorge88]

Great presentation. Documentation is there for a reason. As I always tell my engineers READ, not sure READ,READ some more, before turning on the power!!.

[@Q_Ultimas]

I used one of the STM32 ARM developer boards for my micro controller class. Pretty awesome!

[@TheFlipdave]

You did a great job in putting this video together!

[@CristobalMartinezCh9FOD]

Fun to see Dave so excited

[@JohnSmith-bj7uc]

I wish you made this video a month ago! I really needed it

[@abdurrahmanyaman5700]

This is a very good example how engineering works. Thanks Dave. 👍

[@obiwanjacobi]

I think that wasn't too bad of an experience. Nothing you can't figure out. Thanx for the informational video.

[@Shroommduke]

i can't believe Dave has done 900 of these things, wow that's impressive!

[@AureliusR]

The MSP432 board has a built-in current measurement system, so you can get a graph and statistics of the current draw _live_ as you run or debug. Pretty awesome. TI are starting to put this on more of the LaunchPads.

[@pllpsy665]

This board is definitely very effective as a torture tool to use on EE undergrads. /bangs head against desk

[@foxyrollouts]

when i was a sperm i had a lot to learn

[@OhioSteveT]

I'd love to see you try out the tools Silas is using for their arm processors after trying this out and compare the experience of using the two.

[@SeishukuS12]

I love my STM32 discovery boards, really love the low cost! Been using them for a long time now, really speeds up debugging and prototyping. I started out with the cube stuff and GCC, but I've since moved to my own startup code and got away from the cube "drivers".

[@DundeeRoad]

Very informative dave!

[@leppie]

Vanilla Eclipse for C with embedded plugin with gcc and openocd is my preferred setup. It takes a bit of setup time, but a hell of alot cheaper than commercial offerings.

[@nomadic_rider42]

Hi @eevblog, you might try out openstm32, which is eclipse based IDE and comes with arm-gcc

[@altmindo]

new STM32 nucleos have mbed support - online ide and compiler, online libraries, online docs and this is freaking awesome.

[@Jenny_Digital]

I use Crossworks for ARM and I'm decently impressed with the STM32's. I do take issue with the I2C interface implementation in the Cortex M3 parts however. I can't speak for the other families I2C however.

[@richfiles]

I am consistently blown away by how low power some of these devices are made these days. Man... I mess with vintage calculators, so I se RDL (resistor diode logic) and RTL (resistor transistor logic) from time to time ... It's SO inefficient, power wise. Amazing how far we've come!

[@kfishy]

The STM32LDiscovery is one of the older discovery boards, the newer ones and particularly the Nucleo boards default to ARM's mbed online tool chain and the Systen Workbench, which is ST's GCC IDE.

[@frozenicefox4671]

Hey Dave, i recently had to work myself into the STM32F4 chips for master thesis. I just found this Video just after i got started... Just like you, i hate all those "Fill in here, get an account here, blablabla". It is so annoying... still today... They added the GCC part to the "get started guide", at least for the STM32F446RE Nucleo I found the easiest way to get started with GCC is to set up Eclipse C/C++, get the System Workbench_STM32 (AC6) and use CubeMX to generate the SW4STM32 project. But untill i found out i had to try all the other ways from the "get started" too because it is the last mentioned way... I also had some experience before and can say: Its not really beginnersfriendly! Cheers from Germany, i really love your Channel!

[@pepe6666]

good on ya dave we're getting into stm32 and this is right up our ally. right up my ally like a dongle driver.

[@pepe6666]

right its a month later and ive got atollic studio setup. ya absolutely right about it not being super straight forward. shits improved a bit now but yeah. its great seeing cubeMX change code on the fly though - it saves the cubemx file in the truestory project directory. but yeah im still massively lost. truestudio uses GCC i believe

[@sayersgraham]

The PIC32s use a shocking amount of power compared to even the basic Cortex M parts. It's at least 4 or 5 times. Glad Dave pointed that out, it's a huge differentiator. Good intro to ST ARM parts.

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Search EWARM on Findchips for IAR pricing. Be sitting down.

[@qazqwezxc0]

Yea, 5000-6000 for them. No thanks, Atollic Truestudio has a nice free/monthly ide though. Might even be worth looking into eclipse with an ARM GCC compiler for the board too. Probably one of the reasons why I've stayed away STM chips so far. On the other hand, Freescale/NXP Kinetis is nice cause their IDE is free, but the HW programmer is a bit expensive unless you get the J-Link Segger EDU for ~80 bucks

[@vgamesx1]

Well, you could work around their no limits free trial by installing it in a virtual machine, taking a snapshot after it's registered and simply reload that snapshot every month and save your projects onto a shared folder, though yeah probably best to find another program if you want the least hassle as possible.

[@mrlazda]

But if you want to do any serious job with ARM microcontrollers you don't have many choices, you can pick IAR, Keil or TASKING (I suppose Dave should opt for TASKING as it is Altium product). IAR do negligible better job then Keil, I never used TASKING, but what I heard it is comparable to Keil (except it have support for MIRSA).

[@hubmartin]

+qazqwezxc0 Atollic has now no code size limit free version. I use that instead of Eclipse, gcc, gdb custom made ide

[@Einmal42undZurueck]

There is also a genius GCCARM toolchain available for free: launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded The toolchain is maintained by Joey Je, an devloper from ARM. The toolchain is quite stable and we are using it for production use for more than 4 years now. The only thing is that the toolchain misses MISRA-C which makes safety-relevant development (SIL level according to IEC 61508 or Performance Level according EN 13849) difficult....at least the approval part... Nevertheless, it works far better than KEIL, IAR or HITEX.

[@ElmerFuddGun]

41:36 - only a 1 gigabyte download? Man, it is INCREDIBLE how much they can fit in such a small program! ;-) ... back in my day...

[@LucasHartmann]

Hey Dave! Look for SystemWorkbench, its a package (simplified installer) including Eclipse, gcc, programmer and debugger. STM32CubeMX generates code for it, look for SW4STM32 while configuring the project. Also, its free software: $0, completely unrestricted, forever, source available.

[@EEVblog]

Yep, I'm going to check this out, maybe another video. Crazy that the manual for the dev board does not mention it or support it

[@neddyladdy]

I got it after the invention of a few new sear words using their site. Just downloaded it and there you go. Don't ever ask me how I found the link.

[@hubmartin]

+EEVblog Dave, you can try no code size limit Atollic now. Theres just 3 second nag start screen. I am using that as replace for custom Eclipse gcc gdb pack. It has same functions, comfort plus examples for every board

[@droelfdroelfify]

This! Also thumbs up for the CubeMX code generator. BIG thumbs down for: - not directly recommending SystemWorkbench (a gcc based toolchain plus IDE is what most people want. It's 2016. We don't need no stinkin' proprietary compilers on ARM anymore) - not clarifying that you have to choose "SW4STM32" when generating code for SystemWorkbench - HAVING TO REGISTER FOR DOWNLOADS!!!1111 People will continue to create and publish fake accounts on bugmenot.com until st understands.

[@Einmal42undZurueck]

For me a big THUMBS DOWN for CubeMX initialization code. The code generator works in some way but the used HAL libraries are a mess compared to the "old" FWLIB when you look at code size and performance. The HAL library also uses several "dirty" programming tricks, i.e. intentional weak linkage for required callbacks and other stuff you do not expect.

[@Brumby0]

Excellnt presentation!

[@JerryWalker001]

Really interesting video. I have been developing embedded systems for 30+ years (most recently PIC32) and the GUI configuration tools are really handy although I still tend to do this the 'hard' way as I am used to doing it that way. I find the GUI more useful for pcb design rather than code. I would recommend that beginners at least try configuring a project or two from scratch using the spec sheet as this is a very good way of becoming familiar with the capabilities, pitfalls etc.

[@babaragha5046]

Ddýy

[@vatterger]

The STM32CubeIDE package has gotten a lot better as of late, it's still a bit slow in situations where it shouldn't be (downloading/unpacking firmware packages etc) but it makes development a lot less painful with project generation and debugging all integrated into the IDE. I used it to write the firmware for a smoothly dimmable flashlight with battery feedback etc and after project generation all that was left to do was writing like 50 lines of code to get the desired functionality, all the boilerplate-code was configured beforehand in the CubeMX GUI.

[@mdbssn]

I recently (last couple of weeks) tried out some similar stuff with the STM32s, working with an individual chip instead of the development board, the Cube software and interface seems great, but finding a compiler/ide/something with everything linked as a demonstration to compile and upload your full project was a pain. I ended up going with Cosmic as the compiler and SystemWorkbench and while they play fine together, neither is entirely without problems. Both required a separate registration on a different website, cosmic required a send away for an email key locked to your computer - free up to 32k flash and renewable indefinitely requiring it each year - but not your easy download, install, and you're good. SystemWorkbench seems like a pretty good IDE based in eclipse, but it's got some quirks too - difficulty installing and some information on their site hidden behind logins (though, the same you need to download it). You can download the firmwares from repositories through the IDE, which is nice, but it doesn't always download the most recent one.... I had to manually update one set of HAL firmware libraries from 1.3 to 1.6 or something. If you use the Cube software and import the project it creates, I'm not sure having them installed in the IDE as well is necessary. The documentation for HAL seems to be fairly good, but it does seem that different product series (stm32f1 vs. stm32f4 vs. stm32l1, etc.) have some slight variations, so at least in my brief glance through it, it's been a little confusing to get all the right function calls and whatnot. Don't know why they don't have something of their own to compile and manage projects.... seems like it would be a no brainer. They even have one for their STM8 line of products, though it feels a little dated, but pointing you around to third parties which aren't guaranteed to play well enough together to just compile and run basic demo projects seems obtuse. Took me several nights of working before I got everything configured, uploaded, and running properly (though at least a little of that was a solder bridge!).

[@motherjoon]

As a person that only has worked with Arduino and just got into some upper level microcontroller coding, I find this super useful. Thanks Dave

[@carlosruizmora3111]

Well, when I began with ARM it was kind of puzzling but ST website was tremendously useful to understand how to begin. I just read the getting started pdf without making that much of a drama, downloaded the STM32CubeMX, TrueStudio from Atollic (which is Eclipse and GCC based and it is fully functional and FREE for STM32)... hooked up a small STM32-Nucleo board and voilà!!! I was ready to begin to code and play with the hardware. I think that STM32 is an excellent platform for beginners and it is extremely low cost. Maybe it isn't as intuitive as Arduino, but once you sort out the first one or two bumps on the road, you are light years ahead from Arduino hardware capabilities. Just give it a try and *please* RTFMs!!!! Pura vida from Costa Rica!!!

[@kureigu69]

Would recommend Keil for programming the STM32 families, their pack installer makes everything really easy to work with. STM32s I've found are awesome in terms of capability, but the money you don't pay means that applications support is very lacking (almost non-existent). After 2 months I'm still waiting on someone to get back to me to resolve an issue I've been experiencing!

[@ljay0778]

TrueStudio has the"FREE UNLIMITED CODE SIZE' and it runs on an Eclipse IDE. I found Eclipse tough to get running using the free SDCC compiler for the 8051 core chips but; it compiled the STM32 EXAMPLES seamlessly.

[@marcusk7855]

Glad it's easier to install now a days. GCC was so easy.

[@YouLCD]

STM32 is great, I always have a box of them on hand in case I need to prototype something I ended up just shelling out for VisualGDB, Visual Studio works really well as an embedded IDE

[@SolaLupus]

Hi Dave. I recommend you have a look at the Coocox CoIDE. Really nice free alternative to the other IDEs. I believe it also uses the gcc compiler.

[@vasanth0x55tube]

STM32CubeL1 firmware package has got all the necessary example projects, drivers and *middlewares* that you need for the development.

[@frankbuss]

You don't need it and the Cube software is controversial: www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/st's-(stm32cube)-software-ecosystem-is-terrible-how-can-we-fix-it/ Once I created a simple Makefile with GCC for another STM32 chip. But for my STM32F4 discovery board there is mbed, which is very professional and easy to use (if you know C++), much better than Cube: developer.mbed.org/questions/54385/How-to-use-mbed-for-the-STM32F4-DISCOVER/ But if you have the money to spend, you could use one of the big players like IAR. The integrated debugger helps a lot when you need it. It is a pain to setup Eclipse etc. with GDB.

[@Leonkungen2]

Hi Dave, Thank you for this video upload. If you find yourself the time, it would be interesting to also compare the STM dev board compared to other competitors (Infineon XMC 4000 series perhaps?) Regards from Sweden //Oscar

[@christianbylund4265]

Hi Dave, have a look at the free / open CooCox CoIDE, it includes their own RTOS - CoOS. I use it daily for my STM32F1 development. It uses the GCC toolchain for compiling and debugging.

[@avinash199424]

Need details on the product ... just out of curiosity.. this channel is gotten me hooked. Am I the only one apart from Dave pf course to have seen almost all of the 900 videos or there abouts

[@TheSurvivalSecrets]

I would crowdfund you Dave to design, build, and launch a Cubesat. Is that something you might, or have ever, considered? Would make for some fascinating and educational KZbin videos for sure.

[@EEVblog]

I have kind of considered it, but it's a huge amount of commitment.

[@TheGodbaba95]

I would gladly donate to that cause too.

[@Blowcrafter]

me too. I really like the Idea

[@TheSurvivalSecrets]

Its a miniature satellite which you can build and have it put into space during a supply mission to the International Space Station for example. Then when it is deployed you can control it and collect scientific data or do anything that you programmed it to do. He might have talked about it in EEVBlog #896.

[@noahhastings6145]

A cubesat that just points at earth and displays dickbutt on an lcd

[@yomamsie4438]

I have quite enjoyed development on stm32 with gcc via the embitz ide. Supports quite a few processors too! Very easy and has some config wizards with the stm32 with the SPL rather than CubeMX. Still from ST and a little easier for my brain

[@karastom2304]

Thanks so much, very good explanation, I have question about STNRG and STULX is there is some videos can help me to get start using STNRG and STULX.

[@djrobwilliam1673]

@EEVBlog if it has two DAC outputs does that imply I could convert a little DSO138 Oscilloscope one channel to a two?? It also uses an STM32..

[@MrSwanley]

Do a search for the STM32 "blue pill". It's available from Banggood for less than $4 - and free shipping! (at least to me). It's crazy how much processing power is available, and even the pro tools such as a ST-Link/v2 debug dongle are pretty cheap. I never use any third party libraries, so I'm not interested in Arduino compatibility or how good or bad the ST libs are: but there's a big community out there if you want those things. The drone community in particular seem to be heavily invested in STM32-ARM. [Edit] These are not the low power STM32L, but it's still much less hungry than I'm used to: each peripheral on the board has its own clock and so you only power the bits you need.

[@pepe6666]

YES! this! i got the blue pill. its the way to go. $2US at the moment i think. i just got one up & running at the moment. trying to get led blink going - but my cheap chinese stlink is a bit drunk

[@AlexandreKandalintsev]

I wouldn't use metal screwdriver as a pointer -- an accidental touch of the pcb may damage the board. Or the user if it's a high-voltage application :)

[@pencildesignhouse5366]

Does anyone know where I can find the original project that comes preloaded on the STM32L152 Discovery ? - I cant seem to find it in the Cube example projects?

[@LordGarth6]

the price was temping me to jumping and try out arm, only ever used fpgas pics and arduinos. all that jumping around through all the hoops is crazy.

[@jeromevuarand3768]

I've used STM32 MCUs in a couple of projects, a small F103 for a super compact board and a big F4. After a lot of research I believe ST doesn't support any really free IDE/toolchain. In the end I found a decent arm-none-eabi GCC build and learned how to use OpenOCD, and starting from the Attolic stuff (which uses GCC inside their non-free IDE) and custom makefiles you can get by. But it's a pain compared to what others provide (for example Kinetis Design Studio or LPCXpresso).

[@mahmudistiaq]

you have to use COIDE for GCC...great video...

[@dwarf365]

Hey Dave! Good video, just noticed you always right click and go open in new tab. If you click your scroll wheel it does the same thing. Not that you will probably see this but oh well.

[@dreamystify4748]

He may not have seen it, but I certainly did lol, cheers for the tip :)

[@darkobul1]

FREERTOS looks interesting and has lot of functions builtin. Tasks for example have built in sleep mode so they wakeup MCU on received data. Thanks for making this video.

[@martin2250]

stm32s don't need a special compiler , standard arm-gcc works fine. CooCox IDE does a great job at getting all dependencies up and running. It worked right out of the box with my unsupported, cheap-ass minimum system board and counterfeit stlink-v2. Just make sure to get 1.7, not 2.0 beta for now.

[@DIYTAO]

Ever compared these to Cypress PSoc series? Those seem to be quite flexible, have more or less same IO features and their low cost devkits are quite neat.

[@Quiggers1981]

I use these with Kiel MDK. if you were using the L0 family there is a free full version available. For GCC I think you need to use atrollic true studio. Cube MX is a great tool.

[@stereojos86]

you can use mbed, is a online program and support this board.

[@qwpz]

I had STM32F411 at university (computer science) and after ~month of homework for final project i personally prefer Atolic TrueStudio, it's Eclipse-based IDE running on GCC.

[@jhallenworld]

So funny, I've been doing the same thing at work (I use Cygwin: install arm-none-eabi-gcc, add to path, then use STMcubeMX to generate the Makefile (gpdsc when you build for generic) and linker script (when you build for trystudio)). One hint: do not edit the generated code. Instead go back to STMcubeMX and find what you want to modify there. For example UART baud rate / no. data bits are GUI parameters for the UART peripheral. You want to be in a state where you can rerun STMcubeMX without it deleting any of your own changes.

[@Madmax23419]

I use Coccox with GCC, it's free and has no restriction on the code size. STM32's where my first uC's that i used after years of Atmel's uC's, it was little struggle to find out which tool chain to use.

[@DantalionNl]

I want to come back and emphasize that it now supports makefiles using GCC and the whole STM32 stack has also been integrated into PlatformIO.

[@NelsonSantander]

I really like your videos, I wanted to tell you that pressing the "F5" key will run your program, regards

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Last time I looked, IAR was free up to 32K, no limits but no library source. Problem is it's crazy expensive above that, like several K

[@EEVblog]

Yes, that's in the video.

[@bskull3232]

At least MDK is free and supported directly by ST.

[@Psi105]

32KB limit IAR is awesome until you select a few features in STM32 cube and it compiles 30KB of cube library's into your project to init the chip before you've written any code. Maybe it's better now but it used to do that. Cube IDE = excellent Cube generated code = bloated to hell I wish it would generate raw register code instead of library calls

[@MarcinKurczalski]

Problem is when I couldn't even compile examples for my STM32F429-DISC1 without going 'pro' because with LCD it took like 36 kB... this made my start really slow, but now I'm sitting on nicely setup eclipse-based AC6 SW4STM with CubeMX plugin. IMO it's best go-for, since everybody knows eclipse is literally everywhere ;D

[@dedelefoudu88]

what do you think of the ATSAML21J18B or the PIC24FJ256GB406 .

[@Brutaltronics]

i use CooCox IDE to program the SMT32F103, i think that IDE is compatible with most STM32 parts.

[@joe14jt]

Me too for stm32f4discovery. A few years ago it didn't support c++, only c, but you can find some tutorials on the internet how to enable that... but I don't know about c++ support noways....

[@Einmal42undZurueck]

C++ works at least with the GCCARM toolchain which available for free: launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded The toolchain is maintained by Joey Je, an devloper from ARM. When using the nano specs, there is only ~1k additional code for all the C++ management stuff compared to plain C. When using C++ you should avoid exceptions ;-)

[@onurolce7389]

Finally you made a Microcontroller programming video. Please focus on it more much and make new video series.

[@slap_my_hand]

He should make a video about object oriented ptogramming.

[@onurolce7389]

first, microcontoller programming :)

[@slap_my_hand]

onur olce Fuse bits, registers, interrupts, timers. that's everything you need to know.

[@onurolce7389]

Yes, of course. But these can be programmed in ANSI-C too. Therefore I said "OOP must not be". I hope you understand me.

[@AureliusR]

Dave is far from a microcontroller expert. If you want to learn C, or learn about microcontroller programming, then pick up C In a Nutshell, and pick up Making Embedded Systems by Elecia White.

[@steubens7]

st only recently changed to solicit email, you can view source to get the link

[@KananDethin]

Quantum Leaps channel, thank you

[@mahiaslam6738]

You are great man

[@mrstevenund]

TI's MSP430 line are toted as low power. Has anyone looked into them?

[@rikassen]

What can I say about ST Microelectronics? We developed an automotive ethernet camera around an STM8A micro. The development environment, IAR Embedded Workbench, costs about 2900 euros !!! per 'seat', that includes a source level debugger and it has the MISRA-C rules checker. It only runs with a USB dongle, so no dicking around there. And ST won't give you any information, apart from some example code and a datasheet of the micro. The total user or developer experience was way below average. For my latest project I switched to the Atmel SAMC21 ARM controller, uses GCC and the fantastic Atmel Studio 7 which is essentially Microsoft Visual Studio and I got the C21 Xplained demo board running within 10 minutes right out of the box. And there is a load of example projects, datasheets and Application Notes. That's the way you do it.

[@immcintosh]

IAR is the only modern compiler I've used which has produced provably incorrect machine code after optimization (yes, the most recent version). Very worrying given it's the only option for a certain product I'm working on, and that bug was only obvious because it resulted in an infinite loop. FYI, TrueSTUDIO (mentioned in the getting started) uses GCC. Also CrossWorks and VisualGDB are a couple more options that use GCC and will take care of the messy parts for you. I wouldn't consider trying to set up a whole build process/linker script/all that myself with GCC, but there are a lot of professional options that use GCC as their compiler and after my experiences with IAR I'd be inclined to recommend one of them.

[@sammmmko]

If anyone's interested in programming these, I've been using ChibiOS for my STM32F103. It abstracts away a lot of the tedious stuff, but the documentation is not the best. It's not the easiest to get started with, but I'd say it's still better than just pure stm32.

[@HopWorksET]

Thank you sir for yet another great contribution!! I bought 2 of these to get to know the architecture, and because it supposedly works as a stand-alone STLink V2. CubeMX is pretty cool for generating the initialization code, and I am excited about pairing this tech with my numerous debian linux servers. I just scratched the surface, but I found it interesting that the board actually has two processors on it, including the STM32F103C8T6. This is the same processor that is on several development boards I bought from Ebay several months ago. I am looking forward to using this board to program those smaller boards, and other STLink compatible processors and boards. I was looking for faster 32 bit processors to embedded into numerous IoT projects I have around my house and excited about exploring and learning this platform. It does not have the hand-holding Arduino has, but there is a STM32 port available for the Arduino IDE I plan to explore. Like you said, and I agree, the CUBEMX makes setting up initialization code so much easier than digging through the datasheet to program... say... the pic32mx795f512l (my favorite microchip device).

[@Eletronicafg]

I really started enjoying these ST micros, it integrates rather nicely with GCC, GDB and OpenOCD, they provide low cost development tools (I've bought a Stlink V2 from china for less than 3$). I don't like code generation tools, I use the STM32CubeMX instead to organize what peripherals I'll use and how I'll configure the clocks. And I can develop entirely on Linux : )

[@marcusjenkins]

Excellent, it's a shame that ST website only talks about Microsoft Windows. Any links on getting set up with the Linux development environment for this micro?

[@LarsMacer]

The sw4stm32 ide is free and Linux compatible

[@Eletronicafg]

Marcus Jenkins I don't use IDEs, my toolchain is arm-none-eabi-gcc + arm-none-eabi-gdb + OpenOCD + Emacs. Here is my repository with code examples featuring the STM32F103C8T6 micro (for a different micro you I'll need to provide the correct headers, startup code and the linker script, you can borrow it from STM32CubeMX). github.com/Palmitoxico/STM32F103C8T6-Examples

[@luyfljf862]

Could you do video about VHDL programming? How to get started...

[@henricoderre]

Hi Dave. STM32Cube is a combination of software tools and embedded software libraries: A full set of PC software tools addressing all the needs of a complete project development cycle. By the way, I can't know when this video was posted because I don't see the date anywhere. If you posted this video years ago, you might have found out by now, so I'm no help at all.

[@mitsuki_dono]

Just a quick comment on the dongle for IAR: IAR is rather expensive and you can select a few different options for licensing. You can bind to a single computer, bind to a network and use it on any computer (one per license of course) on the network, or put the license on a dongle so you can use it (for one person) on multiple systems. Useful if you have to go to different locations, just buy one license and use it everywhere.

[@MrSwanley]

The vendors love to push Kiel or IAR, but I'm not really willing to pay those prices or even attempt to justify them at work. You can get some variant on the Eclipse environment for free, though I personally just can't learn to love Eclipse. The environment I went for was VisualGDB, which is a GNU toolchain plugin for Visual Studio(2008-2013, not express editions), which was ideal for me since I was already using VS(2008Pro). The ST-Link/v2 dongle is £17 from farnell (uk). A VisualGDB license is something like £170. Works great. ps. I call it a dongle, but the ST-Link isn't used for licensing, it's just a USB/SWD debug interface. Memory is a bit hazy, but I think you need to activate the plugin online a la Windows itself, but otherwise there is no intrusive license management.

[@azdinator]

Super video

[@AltMarc]

Welcome to the ARM world. Get that Truestudio GCC suite, it's limited/not free BUT you can export from the CUBE-configurator to a GCC format. If you get bigger Projects download the ARM-eabi-GCC compiler, fiddle a makefile and run "make" of your project inside the CUBE-HAL directory structure, use st-link to upload. There are instructions how to bind that ARM-eabi-gcc compiler to Eclipse (TrueSTUDIO sell exactly this), CodeBlocks, Atom editor or even Arduino.

[@lucazader]

I use the STM32 chips on a daily basis and I find they are great to work with epscially with the cubemx which is an invaluable tool to quickly see if a chip will work for your porject and then auto generate a skeleton project!. Dave, you should look into the recently released STM32L4 series of processors, they are even lower power. Also take a look at some of the STM32F3/4 series (cortex M4 based), a few of them have similar low power performance to the slightly older L1 series you featured in this video. For development at work I use Keil, wich is great for almost everything. At home i use keil (code limited) if the project can live within the limits, or TrueStudio (which is GCC based) if I go over the 32KB limit. As a side not, for anyone who wants to get into cortex M0 micros, the STM32F0 series is great, and ST have done a deal with Keil to give everyone a 256KB code size version on projects using an F0 processor.

[@NivagSwerdna]

The STM32L476VGT6 is listed by Farnell as £8+ for a 1-off, whereas the one Dave showed was

[@lucazader]

STM32L433CCU6 on digikey is $5.7(USD) in orders of 1 and much cheaper in volume. I agree it is more expensive. but it is much more powerful as well. Also much more powerful in run mode (84 vs 185uA/MHz ), and similar power consumption in lower power modes.

[@xuio_]

you can use Stm32cubeMX with GCC. Just select TrueStudio, it should generate compatible startup and linker scripts. There is a Python script on Github which can generate Make files from cubemx files.

[@Mr.Laidukas]

+EEVblog Dave, that is why few years ago i chosen to go with LPC micros because they have software development platform that you simply click, download and use with all peripheral drivers and code examples. Embedded Artists do all the development platforms and software/code/examples for NXP LPS's. STM32 seemed very convoluted and not straight forward was to frustrating as for a beginner.

[@FıratDeveci]

You can use Keil for STM32F0 and STM32L0 series for FREE! STM32L0 series also has good features as L1 series. You don't have to use silly IAR or something else. ST has done good thing with Cortex M0 and M0+ series. For example STM32F072 has 1xCAN + Crystal-less (yes it is true) 1xUSB2.0 + 12bit ADCs + 2xDACs and lots of things with running @48MHz.

[@finnsuchara1992]

Excellent quote, that at 40:18

[@pivotmastex]

One problem that I have found with CubeMX is that it doesn't enable the (not always present) FPU and I am not able to find an option to do so. Maybe I am just blind, because having to paste some assembly code to the init file doesn't seem right. (especially since CubeMX overwrites the file entirely when generating code!)

[@Ken8193]

I had to use a stm32 throughout my university degree... oh i remember the joys of the 1.5k page document

[@noahhastings6145]

Oh boy, we used PIC controllers and had to use mikroBasic because my professor was so hip and with the times.

[@alles_muss_anders_werden]

That's it !!!!!!!

[@wheresbicki]

man this reminds me of messing with the Cypress tools

[@jaeholee3816]

The MDK for STMicroelectonics STM32F0 and STM32L0 is a license paid by STMicroelectronics. It is free-to-use for software developers working with STM32 devices based on the ARM Cortex-M0 and ARM Cortex-M0+ cores." - Bruce Abbott Mar 15 '16 at 20:54

[@billigerfusel]

The Code wasn't running after download, because it halted at int main(...), waiting for you to press the continue button on the top left.

[@alexmackuk]

Yeah, hence my comment 'learn to read squeaky!' Complaining about the dev tool pausing when you click download&debug was lame, as was complaining about the schematics being missing and the fact that skipping steps in the process causes problems. Not Dave's finest hour.

[@2Fast4Mellow]

Now the main question: How much power draws the power measurement circuitry?

[@superdau]

I've come accross STM32 micros alot in the last one or two years. I was an AVR fanboy for a long time, but seeing all the performance and features you get for pretty much the same price in the STM32 series, I'm trying to really get going with the ST parts. I have not yet managed to get one running from scratch (yeah, all that initialization of the pins and clocks is just to much; something that was easily doable on an AVR even in pure assembler). But at least I got to the point that I can change stuff in the Cleanflight flightcontroller software for example, like moving pins around and activating additional hardware like UARTs, I2C and ISP to make better use of the chips than the original software. Btw. you can get an STLINK V2 on ebay for 3€. No problems at all even when the development "PC" is a virtual Linux guest running on Windows.

[@ZXRulezzz]

Ditto. Though managed to get bare STM32F152 up and running with arm-gcc from scratch, but I can't still wrap my head around GDB (having used Visual Studio for so long, lol). What I like in STM micros is that you always have an unbrickable bootloader built-in, that can be used to program the thing through UART or I2C. The Arduino is so widespread, I can't even be bothered to buy myself a separate USB-UART adapter :D

[@superdau]

ZXRulezzz It also took me some time to get the debugger running, because I never used one before. But in the end I just followed one of the many "how to"s about it and it worked fine in eclipse (took two or three different tutorials though).

[@ZXRulezzz]

superdau I guess I would use eclipse if my job depended on that, but I kinda dislike it and generally tend to stay away from it. Last time I used it (the one that came with Quartus II in particular), it was unpleasantly sluggish at absolutely everything. And it seemed so complicated to me, that I had to strictly follow configuration guides, because I felt like if I miss a step somewhere, I'll never find it again. Sometimes I wish some notepad-like simple and lightweight IDE existed that would have primitive programming and debugging features like breakpoints and steps. And maybe a hardware viewer. Just like what AVR Studio used to be in v4, before it turned into that Visual Studio-based behemoth of a environment. Or PyCharm, but that's another story :) I guess I'll just learn raw GDB at the end of the day... :)

[@kureigu69]

What you don't get with that capability for the price is any sort of decent applications support. The customer service is non-existent and the forums are almost useless when you want an answer to a real and difficult problem.

[@AureliusR]

Yeah, Atmel's customer support is so terrible it's a joke. Thank goodness Microchip bought them out!!! Also, after quite a bit of experience with micros, TI/Microchip are where it's at. TI's free CCS IDE is easily the best free IDE I've seen (based on Eclipse, which I'm not a fan of, but TI have ironed out a lot of the wrinkles, and it's mostly free -- I've worked with Tiva C, MSP430, MSP432, and Hercules chips without needing to pay for anything but the dev boards). Microchip will sell you pre-programmed chips, which is really, really nice when you go into production. Just finalize the code, get a reel of chips, make the boards and they work!

[@man125403]

Hi, Dave. You definitely should try SW4STM32 AC6 IDE. Runs out of box with CubeSW and st examples, and it is Eclipse - imo, only way, if you wanna make serious projects, not just flashing leds. i worked with Keil a lot, but will not use it anymore. may be compilers are better in Keil and IAR, but as for me, the way, i work with code and with other developers is more important, and Eclipse is the high-end code editor with all that features like projects management, syntax checking, static analyse. not glitchy like in Keil, but clear and usable. here is the link www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/development-tools/software-development-tools/stm32-software-development-tools/stm32-ides/sw4stm32.html?sc=sw4stm32 and you can work with other arm chips (thru SWD) with that setup. i worked with LPC micros with same IDE and discovery's st-link)

[@Levisgil47]

I'm a beginner and started with SW4STM32. All seems to work well with CubeMX. I like the way Eclipse helps out. I just need to figure out how to use all the firmware libraries generated by CubeMX to able to use more peripherals avaiable other than the GPIOs and find where to get more exemples of sw like on arduino IDE... It seems that there is a new comunity going on for the SW4STM32. Linky: community.st.com/community/stm32-community/stm32-forum

[@MrSlowestD16]

It's definitely a cool piece, but with the software limitations it becomes quite a bit more difficult, right? Now you have to program all of those registers and what-not on initialization by hand.

[@gabiold]

Code::Blocks + arm-none-eabi-gcc + libopencm3. Takes some experimenting to set it up (as opposed to out-of-the-box bundles), but after that it is stable, the IDE is lightning fast, the libopencm3 is incredibly clean and not bloated (like the CMSIS HAL). I probably not using the full potential of debugging in this setup, but it works with J-Link for me.

[@williefleete]

I've only just sort of got used to programming in Arduino's flavour of C with something more than blinking a LED. While the low power stuff is kind of interesting, I might stick with the Arduino