Associate II

Question

STM32F429I-DISCO export restrictions?

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
October 9, 2013
10 replies
2388 views

Posted on October 09, 2013 at 21:26

Hi

I am based in South Africa and got a STM32F4 Discovery a while back, and now I tried to order a STM32F429I-DISCO, but Farnell gets back to me with:

Farnell will not accept our order for 2355377 / STM32F429I.

This item cannot be exported outside the EU without an export licence.

What on earth does it need an export license for? How is it any different from the STM32F4 Discovery? And here I thought it was only the US being so hard ass about export restrictions.

Cheers

leppie

#stm32f429i-disco

STM32F4 series

This topic has been closed for replies.

Tesla DeLorean

Guru

Posted on October 09, 2013 at 21:49

I'm hard pressed to understand why, the 429 shouldn't have the CRYPT/HASH, although I'm also at a loss of why that's an issue because it was designed outside the EU/USA, and the 417 is readily available out of China.

I seem to recall earlier boards from Digi-Key had export flags, but the STM32F429I-DISCO from Mouser didn't identify anything on the PO for these.

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xaccAuthor

Associate II

Posted on October 09, 2013 at 22:24

Thanks.

Any idea where I can order this from without all this balony? Our local RS has not come back to either (I got the other board from them).

Cheers

leppie

frankmeyer9

Associate III

Posted on October 10, 2013 at 06:46

That's kinda monopoly game. AFAIK, it has to do with licencing issues from the vendor. If the distributor does not want to pay an extra fee for being allowed to export an item, he will give you that answer. Or, view it market segmentation a.k.a. cartellization ...

You can try another distributor licenced for your region.

xaccAuthor

Associate II

Posted on November 05, 2013 at 14:58

Good news. RS started stocking it now which we have locally. ~US$24 which is cheaper than most :D

xaccAuthor

Associate II

Posted on November 05, 2013 at 16:22

Spoke too soon. Export license crap again...

xaccAuthor

Associate II

Posted on November 08, 2013 at 14:13

I budged, and filled in the 'export license' form. After a few attempts they accept it \o/

Apparently 'hobbyist electronics' is not a good enough use. Had to think about a specific use to declare.

Farnell told me the process can take up to 4 months, but RS got the product released in 2 days.

Not so bad in the end, they are just finicky about people using the device for warfare (biological, chemical, nuclear).

At least I wont be using it to control my flatulence :D

frankmeyer9

Associate III

Posted on November 08, 2013 at 15:07

Usually, this export licenses are requested by the distributor (Farnell, RS, etc.). However, some of them do not see the necessity to invest time/money/effort for items targeted at hobbyists, where they don't expect rewarding sales.

That has not much to do with export control because of possible ''misuse''.

xaccAuthor

Associate II

Posted on November 08, 2013 at 15:27

It is very silly IMO.

Especially when you producing such an ultra low-cost product that seems to be targeted at enthusiasts.

I have a F4 Discovery, but buying the base board and LCD would be quite expensive, and you get no extra RAM.

The only other option I could find was the Chinese 'Red Dragon' (1,2) which is based on the 'Red Bull' board (which I have incidentally), but that is over US$100 and only has an extra 512KB RAM (pretty useless).

This kit could be a complete Arduino/RaspPi killer if ST wanted it that way, given the price.

PS: With the 8MB RAM, it will make a really neat low cost DSO. Using triple interleave ADC you can get 6M (more?) samples/sec would awesome memory depth. Nothing like a real scope, but still fun for hacking basic stuff (1-wire, I2C, low speed SPI/USART).

PSS: The 'Red Bull' board (based on the ST3210E eval IIRC) can run Linux, so on this it should even be more of a reality (aforementioned was touch and go). But saying that, running bare-metal is so much more fun that some silly OS interfering with your objective.

1.

http://www.openmcu.com/?product-204.html

2.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/RedDragon407-STM32F4-Cortex-M4/817206651.html