Choosing the right evaluation platform for STM32F4

[prasanthris]

Posted on December 01, 2011 at 05:49

I need to purchase an evaluation board for hooking up the ARM M4 Core. I saw 3 options for STM32F4 - Discovery / Evaluation / IAR. I am not targetting a particular application or interested in a particular peripheral. I like the fact that IAR tools are supported for STM32F4. I need to weigh between the availability and cost and decide on buying 1 or 2 boards. Can someone recommend me the right board or help me decide on the same?

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on December 01, 2011 at 17:14

If you don't know what you want pick the STM32F4 Discovery, they are ''throw away'' cheap entry boards, and include JTAG, work out of the box with chains from Keil or IAR.

If you need SPECIFIC things, like ETHERNET, LCD, and EXTERNAL MEMORY (SRAM/NAND) you will need to purchase significantly more complex/expensive boards. ST has there own, which are recommended for cross platform compatibility, and then IAR and Keil will have there own tied to there own tool chains. That's not to say you can't port or compile on a different chain, but there is more labour involved. If that's you cheapest or buried cost, then pick the cheaper board, or the one bundled with most of the features you expect to evaluate. So again pick the STM32F4-Discovery to get your feet wet and understand where you want to go next. The investment is insignificant, and the knowledge can be applied to other boards moving forward.

[hpipon957]

Posted on December 02, 2011 at 15:55

Hi

The discovery board is very cheap and includes STLINK on-board and so should be bought in any case (it can also be used as JTag debugger for other boards). It has a 'big' chip on it with lots of SRAM and FLASH (unlike the STM32F1xx discovery board which had a small, slow one which couldn't be used for much). It has headers for all signals but will need peripherals and connectors added to be of practical when used for developing projects. The IAR board (Olimex) contains a J-Link lite so can also be used with available tools or IAR. It allows much more to be done with the board without needing to first build adapters. The ST-Micro board is the most complete board since it has more external peripheral support - it doesn't have a Jtag debugger though (as far as I know) so you will to have one already or purchase one in addition. Whereas the IAR board has a small color OLED the ST board has a better and larger TFT display. If the inbuilt camera interface is of interest the ST-Micro board also has a video camera whereas the IAR one doesn't. Personally I would go for the ST-Micro board. It costs about $350 whereas the IAR one costs about $250 (the discovery board is less than $20) but the ST-Micro board offers that much more. Since the IAR board is also not exactly cheap I would invest that extra to be sure that I weren't disappointed (due to to cheap OLED and lack of camera). Regards Mark