New to STM32's and MCU's in General

dylan · ‎2016-08-26

Posted on August 26, 2016 at 10:06

Hi All,

My name is Dylan and I am new to STM32 MCU's and the more nitty gritty of MCU's in general. I have wet my appetite with Arduino and have had a lot of fun doing so. But I want more and so I have invested in a Nucleo 64 board, the STM32F446RE and I want to now start playing with it.

I want to do this properly though and so I have gone the Atollic Lite route with STM32CubeMX plugged in. I have now gotten a bit stuck - with the Arduino, you plug your board in, start programming then you see it do things. Great. But with this you need to configure the peripherals first and then go onto program it. I have started off with the bast board selector to configure the board but I am unable to see how one starts to ''code'' the board (I do realize I sound like a complete novice, so please bear with me, we all start somewhere). From what I am gathering, the procedure here is to build the project once the board has been configured and one has done a bit of coding in ''main.c'' and then to go into the debugging perspective to step through your code.

If you could please set me on the right path with a tutorial or two perhaps, that would be great. I have tried the Atollic website and YouTube for direction but I am a little lost.

Your help is much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Dylan

Amel NASRI · ‎2016-08-26

Posted on August 26, 2016 at 16:49

Hi Dylan,

Welcome in the STM32 Community!

So here a starter, you have a list of ''Getting started'' documents that may help you.

If you need guidelines on how to use CubeMX, please refer to UM1718 that you find in

http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/development-tools/software-development-tools/stm32-software-development-tools/stm32-configurators-and-code-generators/stm32cubemx.html#

.

You find there also a video that helps you to efficiently use this software tool.

Some examples should be helpful for you, you find them in the

http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/embedded-software/mcus-embedded-software/stm32-embedded-software/stm32cube-embedded-software/stm32cubef4.html

package (STM32Cube_FW_F4_V1.13.0\Projects\STM32446E-Nucleo).

If these resources don't meet your expectation, we are interested to know what do you need exactly.

-Mayla-

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dylan · ‎2016-08-26

Posted on August 26, 2016 at 22:35

Hi Mayla,

Thank you very much for the information, I really appreciate it.

In playing around today I have gotten as far as you suggest but I have a problem in that the STM32446E-Nucleo project does not contain any TrueStudio variants of any of the examples. When I do load one of the other variants, the compiler tells me that there is nothing in the project to build. I see that on Atollic's website there is a resource to migrate a Keil project, but this seems conter intuitive when ST is supposed to support TrueStudio. Do you have any thoughts? I did go to another Nucleo board project to test compile a project from there and it did have the TrueStudio examples and it did compile.

Thanks for your time.

Kind regards,

Dylan

Tesla DeLorean · ‎2016-08-26

Posted on August 26, 2016 at 23:00

ST is supposed to support TrueStudio

I believe support has been dropped to focus on

http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/development-tools/software-development-tools/stm32-software-development-tools/stm32-ides/sw4stm32.html?sc=sw4stm32

in recent releases.

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dylan · ‎2016-08-27

Posted on August 27, 2016 at 09:25

Hi Clive1,

Thanks for the response! Wow, okay, that is disappointing. I spent a fair amout of time and effort getting into TrueStudio. In that case, would you recommend SW4STM32 as a choice for a free, open system? I am onl a hobbyist at this point and need to get my feet wet before investing in serious tools.

Thanks for your time.

Kind regards,

Dylan

Tesla DeLorean · ‎2016-08-27

Posted on August 27, 2016 at 19:20

Ok, so what would preclude you from continuing to the build projects/workspaces for TrueStudio. These tools are designed to build things without any additional input from ST.

On the zero cost basis I use GNU/GCC with makefiles, but the rest of the time I use Keil. I'm not in a position to recommend what is suitable for your needs, tool choices usually come down to personal preferences.

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AvaTar · ‎2016-08-29

Posted on August 29, 2016 at 10:36

> Ok, so what would preclude you from continuing to the build projects/workspaces for TrueStudio. These tools are designed to build things without any additional input from ST.

I tend to agree.

Albeit I experienced debugging under TrueStudio as somehow sluggish, and miss M7 support, it works fairly well. I wouldn't fix a non-broken system...

mark239955_stm1 · ‎2016-09-02

Posted on September 02, 2016 at 10:38

I've been trialing TrueStudio Lite for work, and debugging has definitely gotten worse since v6. Since installing v6 I finished prototyping with a couple of Disco boards and their embedded STLINkv2's and moved to custom boards, so I thought I'd fire up my previously unused Segger J-Link Ultra+. It behaved terribly with TrueStudio, constantly dropping connection to the MCU. Switched over to my $35 standalone STLINKv2 and mostly smooth operation... I do think TrueStudio Lite is great for the money, but it definitely has a few flaws.