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.

Getting started with STM32F746G-DISCO

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 05:06:56 +0000

ST Microelectronics recently expanded its portfolio of STM32 microcontrollers with the new STM32F7 family. These are the new best-in-class MCUs from ST, with a Cortex-M7 core able to run up to 216Mhz (future releases will run up to 400Mhz with 2000 CoreMark index), with an internal flash up to 1Mb and 360Kb of RAM. STM32F7 is also able to run from external flash memory without performance penalty, thanks to a L1 cache (this is probably the most interesting aspect of these MCUs). STM32F7 are targeted for High-end embedded applications, especially to multimedia ones, and I think that it’s far from low-budget applications and hobbyist uses. At the time of writing, these MCUs are quite pricy, ranging from 12€ to 20€/pcs for low-volume orders. This is definitely a really high price, especially if you consider that you can find around Cortex-A7 MCUs for less than 10€. But I think that the price will be dramatically reduced in the future.

Stm32f7 on Carmine Noviello

Getting started with the STM32 Nucleo-F746ZG

Getting started with STM32F746G-DISCO