Wi-Fi support and/or best practice for new board-design?

[Southbranch]

Hi!

I basically have two questions:

• Regrettably, there are no STM32 MCU:s that comes with built in Wi-Fi support and I am curious to fund out the reason for this? Perhaps any new products in the pipe? The need for new IoT applications must by huge these days...

• In the meanwhile, we have started up a custom board design based on a STM32H7. The board needs Wi-Fi and my question is if there are any "HW-best-practice" tips using a 3rd party Wi-Fi chip/modules? So far, we are thinking of using the Type 1DX| LBEE5KL1DX | Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd which supports both WiFi + BLE. The dilemma is that drivers needs to be ported to the STM32 environment which would be cumbersome...

Any comments would be highly appreciated!

[JGENT]

Hello,

There is an existing package with H7 discovery board and a Cypress extension board with associated driver. it supports Modules WiFi (802.11) Murata Type 1DX M.2 Module Eval Board thanks to uSD-M.2 ADAPTER KIT for i.MX EVAL PLATFM. Please try this link to get more information STM32_WIFI_FreeRTOS_V1.1.0.exe

MXCHIP Wi-Fi device is also supported on B-U585-IOT01A board (The U5 discovery board) .

Br

[JGENT]

The link I provided is an internal link , sorry ,you can not access. This should become available soon but I don't have the official delivery date.

Br

[Tesla DeLorean]

Wireless is a hugely fickle and transient market, the product life cycles are short, and the development, testing and integrations ones long.

The wireless group has a long history of abandonment, so a lot of potentially large customers tend to find alternatives, having had their bridges already burned.

SoC while desirable is often very costly, and the technologies used for wireless/rf different than mcus.

Frequently multi-die solutions are probably cheaper/simpler, and honestly if you can partition your design you might be able to adapt to the evolving technologies and demands.

[TDK]

I would just use a raspberry pi for wireless. They're cheap, stable, hugely popular, and unlikely to be abandoned anytime soon.

[Southbranch]

Many thanks for your comments!

@JGENT, thanks for informing me. Yes, it is an internal link but I will keep watching out for availability.

@Tesla, I regret to hear this. Maybe ST should reconsider it's business strategy on this. I believe Wi-Fi access is an essential foundation of modern and competitive IoT applications even though there are others technologies like e.g. BLE, LoRa etc. Even if you do not develop an MCU with built in Wi-Fi module, you could provide a simple EVAL-board with 3rd Wi-Fi chip and include all necessary STM32 drivers, thus making it easy to replicate in a custom design. As an example the Arduino Portenta Board ships with Type 1DX| LBEE5KL1DX | Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd and it works like a charm for both Wi-Fi and BLE in our proof of concept. No reason why ST couldn't provide a similar board. This is the reason why we are considering the same Murata chip in our custom design. Unfortunately we have the dilemma with re-writing the drivers for STM32...

@TDK, thanks for the tip, but we need to develop a custom board for potential commercialization later on. In addition, Raspberry needs a full OS and that is a bit to heavy weight for our application.

[T J]

@Lars Sörqvist​ 

this is a common problem for prototypes,

you should be able to get your own set of drivers working relatively quickly with the right help,

you could ask the guys here, Tesla, TDK, Pavel, Jan and others

Any of these guys could help you over a few days, faster if they had your hardware.

I find ST have great chips. very reliable/stable.

not much to that module. LBEE5K.... did you do a PCB yet ?

do they give you values for the RF 50ohms matching circuit ?

couldn't see it in the datasheet

the RF part's values should be easy to work out,

did you consider the New STM32U series chip ? 2MBytes Flash, 700k Ram (some with ECC), 512bytes OPT, Unique_ID, crystal_less USB

and it has hugely enhanced security features

STM32U575 + LBEE5K + Canbus.. its a plan

but only 1/5th the processing power of the H7.

So many best practice tips, its faster to make the PCB.

PCB: 2 layers is easy with a low density board like that,

4 layers is an option

the RF input matching is not simple but not difficult

[TDK]

You could also consider something like these:
https://www.wiznet.io/product/wifi-module/
I've had good luck with them in the past. They have eval boards available.

[Southbranch]

Thanks for pointing me to this.

If I understand it right, it comes with a complete ESP-MCU and It is probably a more easy approach using AT-commands, I will look into it.

[Southbranch]

Thanks TJ,

Are you saying ST-staff would offer potential consultancy for writing drivers? Any info on the website?

Agree, I like the ST-chips!

You are right. I understand the RF/antenna design will be a challenge. If we go with LBEE5K our first proto H7-board will just have a simple PCB-strip antenna. Most likely with very poor reception and performance, but the whole idea with the proto1 board is to just it up and running and communicating with the LBBEE5K and so on.

The STM32U-serias are quite interesting. But we need more performance and connectivity flexibility. We will go for a STM32H7 to start with and then scale down later on if our application requirements turns out to be less demanding after field testing

We already made a simple 4-layer PCB design for a STM32F1 in order to get our heads around PCB-design and the environment of ST MCU:s as such.

Our new H7-proto PCB will probably be a 6-layer board and more or less a replica of NUCLEO H743ZI2, but with Wi-Fi and possibly BLE-support. Right now we are about halfway into the ***-design.