Problems with USB Serial and NUCLEO-F401RE on OSX

[dhylands]

Posted on February 10, 2016 at 23:09

I have a Nucelo-F401RE board and have updated to the latest firmware on the stlink portion of the board (V2J26M15).

I have some code running on the 401 (MicroPython) which has a REPL on UART2 (which connects through to the 103 chip on the stlink portion - so SB13 & 14 are both present).

I can plug the nucleo board into my linux host, and connect to /dev/ttyACM0 and get my REPL with no troubles.

However, if I plug the nucleo board into my Mac Mini, running Yosemite (10.10.5) then I see /dev/tty.usbmodemXXX and /dev/cu.usbmodemXXX show up, but I can't see any serial data on either one. I've tried using screen and picocom and neither one works.

My regular pyboard (with a 405) and MicroPython works fine (under both linux and on the mini), so there seems to be an issue with the usb-serial running on the stlink portion of the nucleo board.

Has anybody else run into a problem like this?

Are there any workarounds?

[ngwese]

Posted on February 15, 2016 at 18:28

I don't have a solution but I do have what appears to be the same problem. I have a Nucleo-F429ZI which came with firmware V2J26M13. Things seemed to work with st-link under Mac OS 10.11.3 but I couldn't convince myself that debugging worked. Tried to upgrade to V2J26M15 but the upgrade tool failed, after which the board was unrecognized.

Moved over to an Ubuntu 14.04 VM, after several attempts with the upgrade tool I eventually got a clean upgrade. Things seem to work okay now under the Linux VM but st-link remains broken under Mac OS X.

I'd love to downgrade the board until this is fixed but older firmware versions don't seem to be available. 

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on February 15, 2016 at 19:51

I could swear I've mirrored a bunch of Windows ST-LINK Utilities with assorted different firmware releases.