ETT STM32 ARM Stamp

While I have a couple of STM32 development boards already, I was looking around for something a bit more flexible. Somehow, development kits always seem to have the wrong set of peripherals and pins I want to play with are not available. After a bit of hunting, I came across this board, made by ETT. It comes in a convenient, small size with two single rows of pins for the IO. Perfect for plugging into a breadboards for some proper playing…

The board can be purchased from FuturLec for less than $25 at the time of writing. I had mine from an Ebay supplier just for the convenience of Paypal and Ebay. It took about a week to arrive from Thailand. Find out more about it here:

http://www.futurlec.com/ET-STM32_Stamp.shtml

There is no JTAG connector on the board. Instead, a pin header is connected to he UART via a RS232 level converter for boot mode programming. This suits me perfectly. I have all the tools I need and programming using the Python bootloader described in previous posts works just fine. My end application for this chip won’t have room for a standard JTAG header and I haven’t found anything to implement the serial wire debug yet. the processor supplied is the STM32F103RET6. This is a 64 pin device with all the standard stuff, some extra timers, 512k flash and 64k RAM. Should keep be happy for a bit.

If you are a Windows user, the CD included with the board has a bunch of stuff and is enough to get you started writing code for it. Also in the box was a serial lead to connect a standard 9 pin serial port (or USB serial adaptor) to the pin header. All really very convenient.

After a short period cutting and stripping wires, I was ready to start using my new toy. I really dislike the wiring-up part. It never looks neat when I have finished and it is always a relief to get that bit done.

Just for now, it is connected to a few LEDs and one of my trusty Nokia LCD displays. First, things first: get a few lights blinking. Now, having access to all the pins makes it very easy to try out all the pin functions and see how things will work in the final application before getting too committed to the design. Pretty well straight away, I came across some issues to take note of.

Firstly, one of the pins needed to make the processor run in the right boot mode is BOOT1. This happens to also be tasked as PB2. Once the processor has booted up, it can be used like any other GPIO pin but, when using the serial bootloader, or to boot from internal flash, it must be held at zero. the trouble here was that I was using a common-cathode 7 segment display connected to the lower 7 pins of port B. Consequently, PB2 and, therefore, BOOT1 are held high at reset and the bootloader cannot work. For now, I will disconnect the display when programming but a better solution will be to make sure that does not happen in an actual application. In this case, a common-anode display would have been a better choice.

The next problem was that two of the display segments would not come on. That was because they are connected to PB3 and PB4. After a reset, their default function is as JTDO and JNTRST on the JTAG interface. To use these pins as normal GPIO pins, it is necessary to turn on their alternate function. This took a little bit of figuring out but one of the peripheral driver library examples show you how to do exactly that. The only other catch to look out for is to remember that all the IO registers need a clock turning on before they will work. That, apparently, includes the resister that holds that disables the JTAG. The driver library calls needed to completely disable JTAG and single-wire debug are:

/* turn on the clock for the alternate function register */
RCC_APB2PeriphClockCmd(RCC_APB2Periph_AFIO, ENABLE);
/* Disable the JTAG interface and enable the SWJ interface */
/* This gets us back pins PB3 and PB4 and the JTAG pins */
GPIO_PinRemapConfig(GPIO_Remap_SWJ_Disable, ENABLE);

I have plenty of flashy light now. Next, time to get the LCD working.

Related posts:

1. STM32 and the Olimex ARM-USB-OCD on a Mac
2. STM32 Arm-Cortex bootloader
3. ARM Cortex-M3 (STM32) development on the Mac