Choose a ST board suitable for my needs in order to ship to the market

[vernture]

I have a Nucleo-64 STM32F411RE. It's cool. I can program it, debug code and everything nice. But it's too large, however! I need to pack my projects to be as small as possible in order to ship to the market. 

I need an official stm32 board with an included St-Link and features like nearly what a Blue Pill board offers, for now.

At first I thought of NUCLEO-F042K6. Good price (10.8 USD), good size, ST-Link included, but its features may not be enough. 

What do you suggest?

[mƎALLEm]

Hello,

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@vernture wrote:

however! I need to pack my projects to be as small as possible in order to ship to the market. 

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According to this document: EVALUATION BOARD TERMS OF USE 

"The Evaluation Board shall not be, in any case, directly or indirectly assembled as a part in any production of Yours as it is solely developed to serve evaluation and testing purposes and has no direct function and is not a finished product."

So ST boards are used for evaluation and testing purposes only.

[mfgkw · Accepted solution]

In addition to mƎALLEm's note it is hard to suggest anything.

What are your needs? What is wrong with NUCLEO-F042K6? CPU power? Flash? RAM? Peripherals?

There are many NUCLEO-32 boards. NUCLEO-G431KB or NUCLEO-L432KC have more of all.

[vernture]

1- How is a product's output reliable for evaluation and tests when it's not finished?

2- Where to purchase finished STM32 boards?

[mƎALLEm]

1- Tested for evaluation not for final user application. Each application has its own environment, qualification, temperature.. etc.. that ST doesn't in any case be responsible of it.

2- If you mean by "finished STM32 boards" boards to be used in a final project, unfortunately there is no such boards. ST is not boards provider but a silicon provider. The boards provided are available to evaluate its products not for other purposes.

[vernture]

Ah, I'm rather astonished, but thanks for the clarification. 

Maybe not an allowed question but let me ask: What company do you suggest to buy final products from? What I need is some boards like NUCLEO-G431KB or NUCLEO-L432KC. If I also can use STM32CubeIDE and HAL libraries for it that'll be cool. 

[mƎALLEm]

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@vernture wrote:

Maybe not an allowed question but let me ask: What company do you suggest to buy final products from?  

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I don't have an answer for that question, may be you need to find something in the internet.

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@vernture wrote:

If I also can use STM32CubeIDE and HAL libraries for it that'll be cool. 

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Yes you can use these assets for genuine STM32 MCUs.

[TDK]

Just wanted to say that this is standard across manufacturers, not ST specific. Here is TI's clause. It even has the same weird "not finished product" wording.

Adafruit sells a few small STM32 boards, here's one:

adafruit/Adafruit-Feather-STM32F405-Express-PCB: PCB files for the Adafruit Adafruit Feather STM32F405 Express

[Andrew Neil]

As has been explained, ST boards are just for evaluation/development - not for shipping in final products.

This is not common throughout the industry.

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@vernture wrote:

I need ... board with an included St-Link

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Why ?

An ST-Link is a development tool - you wouldn't normally include such a thing in a finished product.

The normal process for developing a product is that you may use development/evaluation boards in the early stages as you start to get things working, but the final product would do your own custom hardware design.

If you don't have the capacity to do hardware design and manufacturing, then there are plenty of companies (and individuals) who will do that for you. For a fee, of course...