STM32F3 Discovery - another cheap, interesting, ST development board

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STM32F3 Discovery - another cheap, interesting, ST development board

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Started 3 years ago by gbulmer
Latest reply from mikep

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gbulmer
Moderator

Folks might have missed the STM32F3-Discovery board
http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/254044.jsp

It has a new STM32F3xx MCU (STM32F303VCT6 to be precise).
The STM32F3xx family is claimed to be pin-compatible with STM32F1xx, so existing PCB's designed for STM32F1xx could work.

It has the usual ST-LINK/V2 so upload and GDB support is on-board, while leaving the STM32F3's USB socket free for other uses.
The CPU is a Cortex-M4 (so like an STM32F4 in that respect), but running at STM32F103 speeds.
The peripherals are claimed to be compatible with STM32F1, so it might be straightforward to get libmaple working on it.

The board has 9-degrees of freedom sensors (accelerometers, gyros and magnetometers). Yum!

I haven't found any distributor with them in stock yet, but I have seen them listed at $10.90.

Posted 3 years ago #
anton
Member

How terrible news for the market of quadcopter control boards. :-D
What is real difference in performance between F1, F3 and F4?

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

STM32F1 is a Cortex-M3 and STM32F4 and STM32F3 are Cortex-M4.
STM32F103 and STM32F3xx run at the same clock speed, so the differences are mainly in floating point, DSP extensions, the instruction cache, and I think something else, but I can't remember what that is!-(

I did see a comparison last year, but can't find it now.

My recollections are:
1. The Cortex-M4 single-precision floating point 'stuffs' Cortex-M3 software FP,
2. Cortex-M4 has a bunch of DSP instructions, which essentially improve MAC multiply-add (and related)
3. Cortex-M4 has simple SIMD instructions to operate on, e.g. 4 bytes, or two 16bit numbers at a time

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

RS had some STM32F3Discovery boards in stock (I got one), but they have now sold out (I assume they had very few, and I was lucky):
http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/7692091/

They were 8.79 GBP + VAT

So potentially quite nice as a development platform for anyone trying to make a quadcopter controller :-)

Posted 3 years ago #
crenn
Moderator

I'll probably get one later after I play around with the new TI Stellaris launchpads I ordered about a month ago and have only recently been sent. Need to also play with the F0 discovery I got!

I'm unsure whether I'll use the STM32F3 or STM32F4 with my future UAV board, but either way, having Cortex-M4F will be helpful for the maths!

Posted 3 years ago #
ala42
Member

I also got a F3 board from RS, so who wanted to get one had a chance.
Using a F3 on your own UAV layout makes sense only if want a 48 pin CPU or very high volume to reduce costs, as the F4 outperforms it in speed, RAM and FlashROM size.
If you want to use libmaple on your UAV, get a prebuild and ready to use F4 based AQ32 board, aka Baloo :). The schematics and layout are also published, so you can even change it as you like if you can handle the SMD stuff on your own. I can handle it in Eagle only, 0402 packages are too small for me in the real world.

Posted 3 years ago #
crenn
Moderator

Well I am looking at a small UAV board, so it could be useful to have a 48-pin MCU.

Part of the reason I'm planning on doing my own is that I want to learn more about PCB design and also making solutions for products. I'll certainly take a look though at the AQ32, although it's a little large for some of my planes.

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

"In theory" STM32F3 peripherals are so similar, it is should work 'out of the packet' with STM32F103 code.
STM32F3 is also supposed to be so pin compatible, it will work on STM32F103 PCBs without change.

Has anyone tried (an unchanged) libmaple and Maple bootloader on an STM32F3?
Has anyone tried soldering an STM32F3 onto a STM32F103 board?

A small PCB with a 48pin STM32F3, might cost less than $10 to make (10-off), and be 'super-intelligent solder' :-)

Posted 3 years ago #
tormod
Member

Note that you can sign up for a free card at http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/254044.jsp nowadays (for North America only AFAIK).

Posted 3 years ago #
ala42
Member

> Has anyone tried (an unchanged) libmaple and Maple bootloader on an STM32F3?
That does not work. USB is completely new, GPIO is almost like on the F4, USART is new (different register map, can swap or invert RX/TX now), SPI is slightly different, flash access is different, address map and bus mapping is more like F1. Have not looked at the timers, ADC and interrupt yet.
I am currently porting my F4 port to the F3, but had no time for it in the last three weeks. Clock setup, GPIO, USART and SPI already work good enough to use the on board sensors now. The compass in the accel/compass chip is obviously a HMC5883L design in and was auto detected by my test software and works out of the box. The gyro seems to be a bit noisy on the first look.

Posted 3 years ago #
K55
Member

Just got one of the sample f3 boards, really looking forwards that new libmaple.
How much more work do you think you have to do until its basically functional?
If you get it close to working, could you post it here?

Thanks.

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

ala42 - Interesting. I had been told the STM32F3 had 'mostly' software compatible peripherals to the STM32F103. I had expected the flash might be a bit different (for a 256KB device vs 128KB), but had hoped that could be isolated in the upload.

I am very willing to believe peripherals are changed except USB.

But I don't understand why you say the STM32F3 "USB is completely new" new compared to the STM32F103.
Are you sure? Maybe my post was unclear, and you meant STM32F3 vs STM32F4 are different?

I had compared the RM0008 (STM32F103) and RM0316 (STM32F302/303) manuals' register description for the USB peripheral on the STM32F103 (Section 23.5) and the STM32F303 (Section 29.5) (about 14 pages) just by displaying them side by side. They looked pretty much identical. This was the peripheral I wanted updated. So I ASSuMEd the comment was true and the rest were very similar :-(

Anyway, I have just compared STM32F103 USB and STM32F303 USB again, using diff.

The register names, bit names, positions within registers, and documentation for the registers and bits, are pretty much the same between STM32F103 and STM32F303.

Awkward to exclude differences are line breaks, so I've printed the two up side by side, and the documentation is the same (I'm happy to paste bin this). One also uses the word STM32F10xxx in a few places. Otherwise, all 14 pages for the two processor families USB registers are the same.

I will go look at the other peripherals. GPIO, Timers and ADC are the most important ones for me. Merging STM32F103 and STM32F4 peripheral code is preferable to writing stuff from scratch.

Posted 3 years ago #
ala42
Member

You are right about the F3 USB device. I gave it a try, enabled the F1 code and added the alternate function setting for A11/A12 to get it working. For the disconnect I pull A12 down, the board already has the 1K5 pullup to 3V.
To get it running under Win7 64bit I used http://pjrc.com/teensy/serial_install.exe like posted at http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=73&page=2#post-11705
Thanks for the hint.

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

ala42 - Great! You are very productive. Have a lovely weekend :-)

Posted 3 years ago #
Mubase
Member

Hi! I just checked http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/7692091/ and it seems they have them in stock.
I have an STM32f4 discovery and have tried getting libmaple to work on it using the bl.zip git repos code ( as seen elsewhere on this forum.) I think I got it to work but now I have no idea how to go about building .bin files to load onto the board..
I would so like someone ( ala42?) to give me a step by step guide on writing a simple program in libmaple code, building it and burning it onto the board. I think I know how to burn a bin.. but what is the bestt set of tools for building a maple program??

Posted 3 years ago #

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