Posted on June 20, 2017 at 10:01The Discovery (and Nucleo) kits all contain two STM32: the target chip, which is in the 'name' of the borad; and then another one, which serves as the USB-connected programmer/debugger, pre-programmed, called STLink.
STLink of every Discovery board allows you to program every STM32 chip, not only the family which is on that board. So you can pick any Discovery board, disconnect the jumper through which the on-board target chip is programmed, and connect your own target, and run the ST-Link Utility program on PC (or some of the IDEs which support the ST-Link), to program your target application.
There are two flavours of this STLink: the older STLink/V2 and newer STLink/V2-1. The newer STLink/V2-1 not only allows you to program the target chip from the STLink Utility/IDE, but also creates a virtual disk, which allows to program the target simply by copying the binary on the PC onto that virtual disk. It also creates a virtual serial port, which is materialized on two pins of the ST-Link, to be used for debugging messages from the target.
The Nucleo boards all contain the newer STLink/V2-1, while only the newer Discovery boards contain that. I'd recommend you to go for the
http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/evaluation-tools/product-evaluation-tools/mcu-eval-tools/stm32-mcu-eval-tools/stm32-mcu-nucleo/nucleo-f072rb.html
JW
