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spflanze
spflanze
Associate II
July 13, 2016
Question

Flashing Difficulties, Worn Out Flash?

  • July 13, 2016
  • 4 replies
  • 888 views
Posted on July 13, 2016 at 20:16

I am using Atollic True Studio lite to develop firmware for an STM32F373VCT while using an ST-Link V2 emulator probe.

I have noticed that the time it takes to flash the firmware has steadily increased and now I have reached the point where it takes forever to do, if it will do it at all. After doing  Run => Debug it goes to the Debug perspective, the project name appears in the Debug window, but the elf file name never appears under this as it normally does to show it has been flashed.

What could be the problem here? Is this the sign of a worn out the flash? I have been developing with this same board for six months, and I have flashed it many times.

#maximum-flash-cycles-stm32
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    4 replies

    waclawek.jan
    waclawek.jan
    Super User
    July 13, 2016
    Posted on July 13, 2016 at 23:06

    Try to flash it with the STLink Utility.

    JW

    Tesla DeLorean
    Tesla DeLorean
    Guru
    July 13, 2016
    Posted on July 14, 2016 at 00:48

    I'm hard pressed to see you doing 10K cycles, let alone 100K cycles... Unless the tools have ''Flash Breakpoints'', or you have some EEPROM emulation grinding on the array.

    If it erases a sector at a time it will get progressively slower as the code gets bigger and more are used. The voltage, temperature and age will effect write/erase times. A number of the STM32 use ECC in the flash lines, but I'm not sure there's anyway to get it to report metrics about what is happening, or how many errors are detected.

    You might want to mass erase, write all zeros, and mass erase again. This might get the charge state of the array more uniform.

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    AvaTar
    AvaTar
    Senior III
    July 14, 2016
    Posted on July 14, 2016 at 07:08

    > I'm hard pressed to see you doing 10K cycles, let alone 100K cycles... Unless the tools have ''Flash Breakpoints'', or you have some EEPROM emulation grinding on the array.

     

    The 10k cycles are guaranteed for the maximal temperature. At room temperatures, you may well reach 100k to 1M cycles.

    Having had some trouble with debugging/flashing within TrueStudio myself, I guess it is an Atollic-internal issue.

    Walid FTITI_O
    Walid FTITI_O
    Visitor II
    July 15, 2016
    Posted on July 15, 2016 at 14:46

    Hi Stephen,

    Try to upgrade the ST-Link firmware to V2-1 version through this Link 

    http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/embedded-software/development-tool-software/stsw-link009.html

    through the ST-Link utility.

    -Hannibal-

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