New F0-Discovery board with 'F051 Cortex-M0 report

donald2 · ‎2012-04-01

Posted on April 01, 2012 at 20:03

Grrrrr!! I just wrote a long post about the new F0-Discovery board, and the forum software threw it away.

Rather than re-write a thoughtful post, I'll do what the crappy forum software encourages me to do and write a mostly useless one.

I was fortunate enough to get one of the new F0-Discovery boards at Design West -- one of my reasons for going.

It has a STM32F051-R8T6 with ID 0x0bb11477, 0x20006440. Two pushbuttons and two LEDs are the only external I/O connections. A protoboard is included.

I wrote a bunch, including the layout of the flash controller and the new serial connection on the STLink part. But I won't risk another half hour of writing to the forum software.

frankmeyer9 · ‎2012-04-02

Posted on April 03, 2012 at 08:10

Hi Donald, is there a chance to read your ''threwn away'' post somewhere else ?

The ST-M0 seems an alternative for lots of cost sensitive projects.

By the way, I had these issues with this forum software, too.

It sometimes just refused to send my long and carefully prepared posts...

donald2 · ‎2012-04-03

Posted on April 03, 2012 at 09:44

No, the post is gone. I didn't remember to copy the text before clicking 'OK'. The forum software returned an error, and the text wasn't there when I hit the 'back' button.

I had written about the board itself, the prototyping board included in the package, and updates I made to my 'stlinkv2-util' program to support it. If I get a chance this week, I'll check those updates into the Google Code project.

I also wrote about the new STLink serial connection feature. The embedded STLink uses the familiar 'F103 chip, with a new hardware feature. It routes USART2 Tx and Rx lines from the F103 to the target processor. I was hoping someone here had worked out the protocol extensions for using this.

donald2 · ‎2012-04-03

Posted on April 03, 2012 at 09:57

I'll write a bit more in a separate post, so as to not lose too much if it fails.

The F0 Discovery board has few components, matching the low-end nature of the chip. The extra bits are only two pushbuttons and two LEDs. This is the opposite of the F4 Discovery, which has a bunch of interesting external gadgets, or the LCD display and touch sensors of the L151 Discovery board.

It even omits the crystal, with empty locations for a through-hole '49 can or a rectangular surface mount package, along with empty pads for the associated 0805 or 0603 caps and resistors. This is probably more useful for the cost-focused target market, which will likely use the HSI clock instead of a crystal or will pick a cost-optimized part that may have atypical characteristics.