STM32 Discovery kit with the STM32L475 MCU beginner help

[John Karpinsky]

Posted on November 17, 2017 at 21:22

I am a beginner on the  STM32 Discovery kit with the STM32L475 MCU.  I need to start from scratch.  Help!

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on November 17, 2017 at 23:02

Sorry can't dead lift you into orbit. Any related experience, employment, education? Do you have a business case for an ST engineer to support your project?

Perhaps see if you can pick up a slide deck from one of the prior seminars, or sign up for this one

http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/about/events/events.html/stm32l4-microsoft-azure-seminar.html

 

https://community.st.com/community/university-community/blog/2017/07/18/stm32l4-discovery-kit-iot-node

 

https://community.st.com/0D50X00009bMM5hSAG

[John Karpinsky]

Posted on November 18, 2017 at 00:00

Thanks Clive,

I am a retired Physicist with a lot of experience with various processors and programing languages. I know this will be a lot of work to get up to speed. I’m not even worrying about writing new applications yet. I just want to get online with the discovery board, and run the demo’s first. This is a hobby, so not a business case. I appreciate your links and I will look into them.

John Karpinsky

[raptorhal2]

Posted on November 18, 2017 at 03:03

The following are the basic steps to get going with a Discovery kit. If you have already “discovered� this, feel free to ignore me.

The Discovery user’s manual available on the ST web site will provide information on hooking up and running the simple demo pre-programmed into your Discovery. It also describes the demo peripherals available on the board, pin assignments and board schematic.

The next essential step is choosing and setting up an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on your host workstation, flavors of which are provided by STM, Keil, Atollic and IAR. These provide compile and debug capability.

ST processors have a very flexible arrangement for pin assignments. One fallout of this is that the processor is somewhat useless at power on, you have to initialize internal peripherals and pin assignments to get functionality.

To ease the getting to functionality problem, ST has a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) peripheral library for each processor family available on the web site, and associated examples that illustrate mainly how to get through the initialization process. The examples include a set specifically for Discovery kits.

And, when you get stuck, this Forum can be very helpful.

Cheers, Hal

[John Karpinsky]

Posted on November 18, 2017 at 15:56

Thanks Hal,

You have provided me with a good overview of the basic process of getting going, and I thank you very much. The IDE flavors you mentioned look good but I downloaded Cosmic. Is that a good choice as well? If not, I will delete it and start over. I know that I also need to connect to the board on the USB port, and communicate using a virtual terminal. If I have got anything wrong or omitted anything important, please let me know.

Cheers,

John

[raptorhal2]

Posted on November 18, 2017 at 17:38

I have no experience with Cosmic, other than a quick scan of their web site description this morning. Perhaps someone else can provide more insight.

Your Discovery board (and the Nucleo boards) have a built in ST-Link Programmer/Debug pod. Check if Cosmic supports that. And check if Cosmic can run in Windows 10.

The IDE provides all the terminal capabilities needed for programming and stepping through the program and displaying register and variable values, and activating the program in Run mode. If you need your application to communicate with an operator at a terminal or another processor, that can be done by your application via the USART,  CAN bus, Ethernet, etc., MCU pins.

Cheers, Hal