Lot of problems with ST applications

[Mark81]

Posted on August 16, 2012 at 10:00

Hello,

first I apologize if my English is not very good. It's not my primary language. I'm quite new to the STM32 world. I'd like to try some tools provided by ST. The first two downloaded give a lot of troubles. 1) MicroXplorer. Once installed, it complains about a dll missing. Why the installer doesn't provide it? Then it doesn't run due to ''can't start the JVM''. But the JVM is installed (32-bit) and I can run other software based upon it. Any idea? 2) dfUse. I downloaded the latest version but any tools I run (file manager, demonstration, tester) lead to error 0xc0150002 without any further details. In the readme there is no mention about any requisite. My machine is AMD64 with Win7. Any help is very appreciated, it's not a very good meeting with ST.... Thank in advance! Marco #dfuse #microxplorer-stm32

[flyer31]

Posted on August 16, 2012 at 13:30

What about trying to buy a ST4Discovery board and then start off ...?

The things you cited sound a bit special for a beginner (I never heard of them and I am not a beginner ...).

[frankmeyer9]

Posted on August 16, 2012 at 14:15

My machine is AMD64 with Win7.

Is it the 64 bit version ? This may cause some of your trouble. But neither MicroXplorer nor dfUse are the tool you would need immediately, or necessarily come in contact with. I have been messing with STM32 for almost 2 years, and never used any of this. If you really want to use some STM32 evaluation board, you better think about the toolchain you want to use for development. With that you will have to deal much more frequently.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on August 16, 2012 at 18:17

Most software is going to assume a US/English 32-bit Windows XP, stray outside the reservation and you're going to be fighting whatever myriad of conditions and systems there are.

As someone who spent a significant amount of time writing Windows applications and drivers, I can tell you it was a system designed to run/work with ''Spreadsheet and Paint'' programs. Working with hardware is a complete cluster, and dealing with the weird language and unicode hacks is a nightmare. Software in the field will run into all manner of DLL variations and AV software which will distort and damage the function of the documented API further. Got Win 7 64-bit, install Microsoft's Virtual PC, and XP Mode, that way you can run tools dating back to the mid-80's without the system complaining or failing. I've used ATMEL tools that haven't worked properly in Vista/Win7 until this year, it's not a unique problem. You should direct complaints and bug reports at your local ST rep or FAE, the forum is a user community, and a lot of us have decades of experience working around the tools, problems and vendors we've encountered. Assume the tools are written by a handful of engineers like ourselves, and not a legion of Microsoft Office developers selling into a billion dollar market. The edges will be rough, bring a file.

[Mark81]

Posted on August 24, 2012 at 10:39

Thanks to all for your answers.

I'm sorry if you thought I wrote my compliants to the forum, it wans't in my intentions. I've just asked if somebody ran in the same issues. About the questions. Both software are explicity declared to be compatible to Win7 64 bit. From the manual of MicroXplorer: PC and compatibles running with: �? Windows XP or Windows 7 32-bit operating systems �? Windows 7 64-bit operating systems A Java Runtime Environment version 1.6 or newer must be installed. On Windows 7 64-bit, install the 32-bit version of Java. And from readme.txt of Dfuse: Supported OS ***************        + Windows 98SE, 2000, XP, Vista, Seven (x86 & x64 Windows platforms) So I think the problem is elsewhere. Then, perhaps you're right I don't need MicroXplorer and Dfuse, but why I can't just see what the offer? And if I'm not wrong Dfuse is needed to upgrade the firmware using the USB connection. This is a feature I need right now 🙂

[rob239955_stm1]

Posted on September 06, 2012 at 23:06

Marco - not sure if you got the answer you wanted, but you helped me.  I made a spreadsheet of the GPIO pins on our board and was going to determine the register settings when a colleague said ''oh, just get the MicroXplorer and it will do that for you''.  Well, it's two hours later and I finally got the program to run, I still haven't learned how to use it, so I'm not sure it's really a time-saver.

Problems I had: 1) find out how to download it - very bottom of the tab labeled ''Design Support'' was not a very intuitive location, to put it mildly.  I expected it up top like most sites do it, tried saving it to myST, but that did nothing (still doesn't show up in that page).  I thought maybe I needed to be a member of myST to download, so I also signed up for that in the process. 2) It wants ''Java 1.6'', and asks if it should install it.  Saying yes or no does the same thing - nothing.  So I tried installing it myself.  Turns out Java doesn't call it 1.6, but version 6, update 35.  Version 7, update 7 is the latest, that didn't work.  Since I have a 64-bit system, I tried the 64-bit Java, but that didn't work even after a reboot.  Then I saw your latest post, and downloaded the 32 bit Java, staying with 6.35 to be safe, and now MicroXplorer actually runs!  Yay!   Now I get to see if it's intuitive to use and if I will recover any of the time lost today. Your expectations are perfectly normal - if it says Windows 7, 64 bit, it should run on that system, no matter what troubles a person might run into with the DLLs on their previous project.  DLL trouble is certainly nothing new.  In my case it was just getting the expected version of the Java Runtime Environment installed. Thanks.

[rob239955_stm1]

Posted on September 07, 2012 at 00:14

Okay, plugged in the data, and the option for code generation is greyed out!  I was hoping to get the GPIO register settings, which should be pretty easy for a tool like this to do.  Not sure why I can't do it, a preliminary search didn't show up anything. As it is, this tool is useless for me (embedded software guy).  Could help an EE with board layout/pin selection though.

Forgot to mention in my earlier rant that I thought I could find the MicroXplorer from any of the actual product pages, but that doesn't appear to be the case.  I had to do a search specifically for MicroXplorer  so if you don't know about it, you won't find out about it.

[David Littell]

Posted on September 07, 2012 at 02:27

Are you using the Standard Peripheral Library to help you take a step away from the actual bits in the actual registers?  There's examples and headers and functions and stuff that don't take too much beer to figure out...  😉

[Mark81]

Posted on September 07, 2012 at 13:26

Well, some good news. Your posts helped me a lot, too.

I had to remove the latest java version and install the older one (6.35). Now it works. They should add to the doc it doens't work with the latest jre. Anyway I sadly confirm it is useful only to design the board (the main goal I was looking for, though). It seems the code generation is there only as placeholder - it isn't implemented (yet?).

[francesco239955_st]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 14:22

Hi, I'm an italian guy with similar problem on DFUSE demo.

What I've done is to install JRE 6.35, disconnect any USB device. OS: Win XP SP3 just reinstalled fresh Problem: DFUSE Demo doesn't start (no windows opened), while DFU file manager is giving error code 0xc0150002. I'm using dfuse on the laptop with same OS without any problem. Suggestions?