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?

[xisco]

Hello,

If you can't design your own board, there are several boards you can find from various online vendors. Since many of them has a fake microcontroller installed, to ensure good reliability, you'd need to replace it with a genuine one, purchased from a trusted dealer.

You'd also need to ensure that the board design you choose is compatible with the datasheet of the installed microcontroller.

For example, the Blue Pill you mentioned usually has a fake microcontroller, and it also has a LED connected to the PC13 GPIO, which, according to the microcontroller datasheet, cannot be done.

You can use the ST-LINK of your NUCLEO board to program it, if your board has a genuine STM32 chip installed.

Regards.

[mfgkw]

Maybe it's time to learn how to design a custom board. Something like a bluepill is not really hard to create, e.g. with KiCAD. Several PCB services can produce them for you once you have a design.

Another idea: many boards like blue pill or even better black pill have their design available for free. Take one of them and give it to a PCB service to produce some dozens or some hundreds. You get a blue pill or black pill with a genuine STM soldered on it.

[Andrew Neil]

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@xisco wrote:

Since many of them has a fake microcontroller installed, to ensure good reliability, you'd need to replace it with a genuine one

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Not sure that's really going to be viable in production?

A bigger problem with "Blue Pill" is that you really have no guarantee of what's actually going to be on it - there is no continuity of supply.

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@xisco wrote:

a LED connected to the PC13 GPIO, which, according to the microcontroller datasheet, cannot be done..

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It' sourcing current which is the problem (due to the power switch); I think the Blue Pill only sinks the LED current - so that's OK:

https://community.st.com/t5/stm32-mcus-products/stm32f030-pc13-14-15-current-sink-limits/m-p/721081/highlight/true#M261048

Here's one "Blue Pill" schematic:

https://stm32-base.org/assets/pdf/boards/original-schematic-STM32F103C8T6-Blue_Pill.pdf

But, again, no guarantees that any particular product sold as "Blue Pill" will actually conform to that. 

[xisco]

Sorry,

I forgot it was for production. Obviously change chips is not a good solution.

Regards

[Grant Bt]

I think Adafruit sells a Black Pill F411 board. Hopefully made by them, but you may want to verify that.

Consider also Olimex and Waveshare. We've had good luck with them.