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Sunday 12 January 2020

STM STM32F103RC8T6 - really?

Well,

On popular auction sites you can find these boards for less than 2 GBP delivered:


They contain (on the underside) a STM32F103RC8T6 processor from ST Microelectronics. Looking at my musings from here, these boards will support the necessary double precision maths and also have the SPI interface needed for frequency synthesyser interfacing - amazing!

These will work with the Arduino IDE with a very small amount of effort.

Assuming you already have the Arduino IDE installed (if not go get it), the steps are:


  1. Go to the Tools -> Boards -> Board Manager and install the Arduino SAM boards (Cortex-M3)
  2. Download the STM32 support package from here.
  3. Unzip the download to create the Arduino_STM32 folder
  4. Copy the Arduino_STM32 folder to My Documents/Arduino/hardware (Note: if the hardware folder doesn't exist you will need to create it).
  5. Navigate to My Documents/Arduino/hardware/drivers/win and run the install_drivers.bat file - right click and run as Administrator
  6. Restart (or start) the Arduino IDE and select "Maple Mini" as your board, "Original" as your bootloader
  7. Attach the board to the PC with a USB cable, you should see a "Maple DFU" device under "libusb-win32 devices"
You could then try this sketch and upload it to the device; please note that at this point you don't have a COM port for the board - it is using the bootloader via the DFU device instead.

Once the sketch is loaded you will then see a COM port "Mapel Serial" which you can now also select in the Arduino IDE tools -> Port.

I've connected my board to my SV1AFN ADF4351 board as follows:

STM32F103RC8T6 Pin 7 -> SPILEA (pin 3)
STM32F103RC8T6  Pin 6 -> SPICLK (pin 1)
STM32F103RC8T6  Pin 4 -> MOSI (pin 4)
STM32F103RC8T6 VCC -> 3V3 (pin 7)
STM32F103RC8T6  GND -> GND (pin 5)

and have run this sketch - seems to work just fine.

I then ran this sketch - and followed the instructions in the Serial Monitor to upgrade the bootloader - once I'd done that I then needed to select Tools -> Bootloader Version -> 2.0 for any future comms with the board.





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