Adding ethernet connectivity to a STM32-Nucleo

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 05:23:37 +0000

One drawback of the Nucleo ecosystem is the lack of a version with ethernet connectivity or a dedicated shield officially supported by ST. There are 90 different STM32 MCUs available that provide an Ethernet MAC interface (this means that only an external ethernet transceiver - also called phyter - and few other things are required to bring your MCU to the IoT world). STM32Cube (the HAL officially supported by ST) also provides support for lwIP stack. But, all the current Nucleo boards are designed with a MCU without an Ethernet interface (I think that the main reason is that only two STM32 MCUs with Ethernet MAC are available in LQFP-64 package and the Nucleo boards are designed to be pin-to-pin compatible between its releases - L0, F1, etc). This means that without a dedicated expansion shield it is impossible to add network connectivity to our Nucleo. And this is a sin considering what that MCU can do.

W5100 on Carmine Noviello

Adding ethernet connectivity to a STM32-Nucleo