f407 board with examples

[dusan2]

Posted on March 15, 2013 at 08:39

Hi!

The Discovery board based on f407 served me as a starting point in preparing a course on the use of microprocessors for local students, which do not have much experience with hardware, but are familiar with the programming of personal computers, and know some things about digital signal processing. I have prepared description of the hardware and several software examples, explanations included. The hardware from the Discovery board was upgraded to accommodate the electronics needed for experimenting in the laboratory. The files are available at

http://www.fmf.uni-lj.si/~ponikvar/STM32f407.htm

 for public use. This is the zero-th version of documents. Please comment! Du�an #make-own-stm32-board #stm32f407 #experiments

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on March 15, 2013 at 10:49

The board design and documentation look to be very well executed, the PDF's perhaps are not friendly with Firefox's new internal viewer, and on the slow side with Adobe's so you might want to look at the tools and settings used to publish them.

I think the software examples are problematic, they assume initial conditions, which if changed will break them. The hard coded values lead one to either know all the minutia or ignore all the detail. This generally leads to students copying and pasting code they don't really understand, and then changing that code with blunt force until it kind of does what they want. The bigger problem from students presenting such code as acceptable work in an interview is that people like me wouldn't hire them.

[raptorhal2]

Posted on March 15, 2013 at 15:26

You have put a lot of thought and effort into this.

A nit - The ADC description refers to one of the internal signals as ''power'', it should say ''battery voltage''. A tutorial on ADC accuracy would be useful, including an analysis of the sampling time needed for the 22 ohm input impedance. Direct coding of registers is used instead of the Standard Peripheral Library in the examples. I hope that somewhere in their instruction, they are taught how to make code that is maintainable so they are more employable. Cheers, Hal

[dusan2]

Posted on February 13, 2014 at 11:01

Dear Clive and all others,

Thanks for your remarks. I have taken some of them them into account and prepared an updated version of the text to share beside the old version. Please check and comment. Regards