Documents - do you agree?

[turboscrew]

I wonder how many of you agree with me about the needed documents when playing with STM32s?

I'd say, one needs 3 documents:

• the data sheets of your device
• the reference manual of your device
• the ARM Architecture Reference Manual of your device

Those cover pretty much everything, but are sometimes hard to read. So in addition there are 2 other useful documents:

• the ARM technical Reference Manual of your device
• the STM32 programming manual of your device

[MikeDB]

Unfortunately with STM's poor documentation standards you often need the datasheets of related devices to the one you have, especially the one your datasheet was edited from to work out whether the datasheet you have is likely to have been edited correctly.

[S.Ma]

Datasheet and Reference manual corresponding to a chosen STM32.

When designing a pinout, the pinout and alternate function table, plus the DMA channel table are the main constrains to solve.

For the core itself, unless there is a need to code in assembly, I let the compiler toolchain take care of the programming manual details.

When using HAL or LL read carefully the file headers not to wander around on how things should work out.

[turboscrew]

Well, systick, debug HW and the system control block is described in ARM documents. Not in STM documents.

Well, they are parts of the core.

[waclawek.jan]

Would there be adequate appnotes and examples, that would be useful too.

JW

[thanks4opensource]

I personally find it very annoying that one to needs to use two documents -- the reference manual plus the datasheet -- to do AF (alternate function) setup. The reference manuals tell how to change a GPIO pin to AF, but only the datasheet has the table of AF-to-GPIO mappings. The information should be in both documents. Same thing with alternate function remapping (AF can go to one of several different GPIO pins) on some ST MCUs.

And all of the above is much more difficult to use -- and infinitely less powerful -- than on chips like the NXP LPC series. Those can connect any peripheral to any GPIO pin (with some limits for pins that have special hardware capabilities like ADC or high current drive). Not "each peripheral function can only go to one (or two) pre-determined GPIO pins".

[DTrim]

I agree with 'turboscrew' on this list of docs -- I always pull down the same set for any manufacturer's device (NXP LPC, Kinetis, Atmel, TI, STM) that I design around. And there are errors in all of them. Some are better than others (Freescale would rate highest IMHO).