Programming STM32F103 in Production, medium-high volume

manuel239955_stm1 · ‎2012-07-25

Posted on July 25, 2012 at 13:45

Dear all,

As part of my bachelor thesis, i have to investigate the programming techniques offered by STM32 microcontrollers.

For R&D I would recommend the use of the JTAG port since debugging is also a big point. But what is the best ''programming technique'' for production? The volume is about 100-1000 microcontrollers a day that have to be programmed. Important for our production is flexibility (ISP is definitly prefered over the use of some external program adapters), easy handling, hardware cost and programming time.

Does anyone of you guys got experience about this case?

You would definitely help me a lot!

Thanks in advance

regards, Manuel

pmoore · ‎2012-08-14

Posted on August 15, 2012 at 00:36

I've had great success programming with the cheap little ST-LINK (ideally version 2) and the windows command line utility using SWD on a functional test fixture that can run more than 30 units an hour. This is for products built around the STM32F100 and STM32F105. Full flash erase, program, lock cycle time in under 15 seconds. Good success with the same hardware with Linux environment command line utilities....which I think have free source available.

It wouldn't take much to make a little target powered SWD programmer, but these are also readily available for about the same cost as a quality bench meter.