Stm32cubemx on Carmine Noviello

Getting started with the STM32 Nucleo-F746ZG

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 17:30:28 +0000

Finally the totally new Nucleo-F746 is in my hands! This is the first development kit of the Nucleo-144 line from ST, and I’ve to say that probably, at that street price (~23$), is the best development kit a maker can find on the market, if you consider that a genuine Arduino DUE costs more than 40$ and its MCU is just a Cortex-M3.

Compared to the classic Nucleo-64, it looks impressive: it’s more wider and offers a lot of more “standard” peripherals. The USER LEDs are now three (red, blue and green), and the power LED is now green. The most relevant thing is that the board comes with a LAN jack, magnetics and a SMSC phyther. This means that we can start developing IoT applications using the powerful Cortex-M7 core running at 216MHz. Respect to the STM32F746-Discovery, which was the first “cheap” F7 development board from ST, it doesn’t provide an LCD display. However, the Nucleo-144 provides the most of MCU signal I/Os through the “Zio” connectors, while the Discovery-F7 only few signals routed to the Arduino-style connectors. If you are going to use the Nucleo-144 to develop a custom product, then it’s the best option.

How to quickly import a STM32CubeMX project inside an Eclipse project

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 14:08:08 +0000

I’ve implemented a faster way to automatically import CubeMX project into an Eclipse tool-chain based on the GNU ARM Plugin, as described either on this blog and in my book.

I’ve implemented a bare-bone python script that simply “translates” a CubeMX project for the SW4STM32 (aka AC6) tool-chain in a project generated with the GNU ARM plugin. The script can be downloaded from my github account. Let’s see how this works.

First of all, we have to generate a new Eclipse project using the GNU ARM Plugin. Go to File->New->C Project and select “Hello World ARM Cortex-M C/C++ project. You can choose the project name you want. Click on “Next“. Here we assume “test1” as Eclipse project name.

Running STM32CubeMX on Mac OS. Finally!

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 06:20:05 +0000

Being a STM32 programmer on Mac OSX, I was frustrated every time I had to launch a virtual machine running Windows only to use the STM32CubeMX tool from ST. For those of you new to this program, it’s a really useful graphical tool that allows to automatically generate setup files for a STM32 MCU according the configuration we need. For example, if we have the Nucleo-F401RE, which is based on the STM32F401RE MCU, and we want to use its user LED (marked as LD2 on the board), than STM32CubeMX will automatically generate all files required to configure the MCU (clock, peripherals port, and so on) and the GPIO connected to LED (port GPIO 5 on port A on Nucleo boards).