Can you use Ethernet, I2C, UART, LCD, and touch panel all simultaneously on any STM32 Discovery Kit or Evaluation board?

[CN.1]

Hi,

I'm wondering if you can use Ethernet, I2C, UART, LCD, and the touch panel all simultaneously on any STM32 Discovery Kit or Evaluation boards. I've been specifically looking at the STM32H745I-DISCO and STM32H743I-EVAL-2. I have looked at the datasheets and schematics and the pin assignments in CubeMX, but am still not 100% sure how this all works and if it's possible to use all 4 of those peripherals/interfaces simultaneously with the current board layouts. For example, I noticed some of the pins required for the Ethernet connection appear to be used for the LCD and the I2C interface that is exposed is the same one that is required for the touch screen and there is no other I2C interface exposed on the board as far as I can tell. So, does anyone know if there's any way I could use all five desired functionalities simultaneously on either of those boards, and if not, would it be possible on another eval/discovery board? If not, does anyone know how difficult the modifications may be to expose the necessary interfaces or if that's even possible.

Thanks!

[Sebastiaan]

Good question, and it's probably not easy to find out for anyone.

In any case, the routing of pins on nucleo boards would typically allow for all or most of these interfaces to run in parallel. I haven't used LCD so can't say how many pins it requires. The ethernet interface requires a specific LAN chip, which would be hardwired on the board that you order. So be sure to configure that first in cubeMX (verify the pin mapping!) and try to fill up with that's left?

In any case, the development boards are probably not suited for an all-in-1 integration. If you are looking for a hardware solution that provides it all, we have used a mikroe fusion board for ARM: https://www.mikroe.com/fusion-for-arm . It's a lot bigger but exposes more peripherals and is nicer to 'plug and play'. It's also more expensive, clearly.

BR,

Sebastiaan