This is about Programming the miniSTM32 board(on linux), which is a stm32f103ve based evaluation board.

The miniStm32 board

This board can be programmed using its serial port(and needs a button connection to reset the board too), so these steps are quite general and shoud work accross boards and processors in similar families.

First of all you need the supportng documentation to know about the board.

Skim through these…

Now download the stm32f1xx standard peripheral library, which contains CMSIS, the standard periph. library example code, and some template projects. Look at some of the code in this to understand how the libraries are structured. (Actually, dont download it, download miniSTM32 board support package, which aleady contains it, nd a few more things). What a bsp does is, prvide you files with board specific defines, functions etc. which you would otherwise have to do on your own.

Also you need a cross compiler toolchain to compile code with. I use the Codesourcery g++ lite toolchain from Mentor graphics. Be sure to download the arm-none-eabi toolchain.

Now, look at the XS3 header in the board schematic; that is the large JTAG connector header on the board and you can see its orientation by looking for the continuos ground connections on the other of the board. The pin we are interested in is the nRST pin(or even the JRST pin I think). This pin can be used to reset the board; so connect it to a press button,(other end to GND). The other thing we are interested is the BOOT0 pin of stm32f103, which is used to select the boot memory; look at the connections, and the reference manual. This is connected to the jumper besides the USB port. Remove it and press the reset button to make the board boot into system memory, which contains the bootloader. Now you can use stm32flash to upload code to the board.

Now you are ready to program this, or similar boards. You can use a JTAG debugger with this to debug your application. I didn’t have that, so had to make do with a hackish solution, of using a bus-pirate v3 board to act as my JTAG debugger.

Some stm32 based boards like the stm32vl-discovery, or the stm32f4-discovery have onboard stlink debugger, which you can use along with gdb to debug your application. You’ll need stlink thoough. You will be able to load programs and debug using USB.



blog comments powered by Disqus

Published

22 June 2012

Category

projects

Tags