Which STM32 board?

[Jon86]

I want to get into developing real 32 bit ARM based micros, and I decided the STM32 range would be a good route to take.
Which development board should I buy? Are there any that are breadboard compatible?
Or is there maybe another manufacturer that would be better?
Any help greatly appreciated   

[AlfBaz]

I took the plunge with the very, very cheap discovery board series. They come with built in stlink with headers to use on your own boards (in SWD mode) and have simple .1" headers for nearly all pins to jump over toa bread board. There are also expansion boards available for these such as this

[Jon86]

Great, any particular discovery board? There seems to be a big range.

[Bored@Work]

It doesn't matter. Any can keep you busy for a long time. I would look for one with an F4 (M4 Cortex core), but that is just for bragging, not that you need one for learning. Maybe a 32F429IDISCOVERY, the LCD and the gyro seem to be fun.

[jeremy]

The F4Discovery (not the 429) is supported by mbed, which is an ARM backed peripheral/usb/Ethernet/RTOS library. St just joined the consortium, and new mbed specific boards are expected in February if you can wait that long 

[tszaboo]

Yes, the discoveries are really good, I highly recommend getting one. In fact, if you make PCBs afterwards, I would get a range of them, just to have the correct/closest one. I dont even remember how many of them I have at work or home. Must be 5-6. Lot of times they give it for free at exhibitions.

[AlfBaz]

Yeah I have the 429 and 407. The lcd on the 429 is very useful, they have a set of files that allow simple text output for debugging and diagnostics.

I find some of their library documentation a bit "scattered" in that you'll sometimes find it under their other mcu's docs. It also appears that they expect you to generate documentation on a lot of their code by running doxygen on the source

[MasterBuilder]

Ive a Discovery board and the much more expensive Mikroelektronika STM32 Dev board. I would recommend the Discovery board, the extra features of the Mikroelektronika board  arent needed when starting out and there are a couple of annoying documentation errors with the Mikroelektronika board.

[dannyf]

any particular discovery board?

I would think about what tools you intend to use to program those chips and for what applications before deciding on the hardware.

I use CoIDE for free work. That means I am limited to STM0x, STM1xxF (no L), and STM40x chips. STM0x chips are good / simple chips, especially if you migrate from an 8-bit environment. I don't like them due to their dissimilarity with the bigger chips.

STM1xxF chips are the mainstream one, with more limited peripherals than available on the newer chips.

I would say that STM1xxF or STM401 are both good chipces for typical "embedded" fun (STM401 doesn't offer as much value however). STM42x gives you the option to run an OS.

[dannyf]

Or is there maybe another manufacturer that would be better?

I would recommend the CM4 launch pads from TI: incredibly feature rich.

[Jon86]

I just tried to place a order from them, and when I got redirected to their payment page, they wanted $30 or more for shipping! For an item that costs less than $10!
I'm probably going to be going for TI then, as far as I know they don't charge for shipping. I could've bought from farnell or somewhere else, but they still charge way too much for shipping. Bastards.

[gnif]

I have been working with the STM32F1xx development boards for some time now, I even wrote the flash program (stm32flash) for the thing, which I no longer maintain for reasons shown down below.

For price, the best I have found is Futurlec, they have two offerings:

They have the STM32 Stamp module also:
http://www.futurlec.com/ET-STM32_Stamp.shtml ($24.90 USD)
This one contains the STM32F103RET6 which has 512K and pretty much every peripheral you could want.

http://www.futurlec.com/STM32_Development_Board.shtml ($39.90 USD)
This is quite a nice board as it has a JTAG header among other peripherals for testing and development.
The only thing to note here is the chip is a STM32F103RBT6 which is only the 128K version, and missing a few peripherals, a shame really. I bought some RET6 chips from alibaba and swapped it over as I develop on this board but deploy onto the stamps.

As for development, I learnt the hard way that using the serial interface/uploader etc. is a major pain in the ass as there is no way to debug the running code other then provide some kind of visual feedback. You will save yourself a world of pain if you get yourself a USB JTAG interface and use OpenOCD which supports the STM32 range of devices. This allows you to debug your code on the device, set breakpoints, step the code, inspect registers/ram, etc.

These are wonderful devices IMO, fairly cheap, and very powerful for the price. There is also a nice open support library, libstm32 which is FAR superior to the ST library. It is a bit lacking in documentation, but it is very nice to work with.

It is also possible to run FreeRTOS on these devices making them very useful.

[Jon86]

Those boards look pretty good, I'll definitely consider those.
The only thing that's pushing me away from these devices is the awkward packages (for me at least).
I want to make a load of projects with microcontrollers, but it's going to be a huge pain in the ass to keep ordering PCBs for a simple little project. I loved the MSP430s because I could just solder the chips straight into a stripboard.
I guess I could put the dev board straight into the project, but that's hardly practical really. I'll probably just bit the bullet and see how it goes, there's not much to lose.

[gnif]

Those boards look pretty good, I'll definitely consider those.
The only thing that's pushing me away from these devices is the awkward packages (for me at least).
I want to make a load of projects with microcontrollers, but it's going to be a huge pain in the ass to keep ordering PCBs for a simple little project. I loved the MSP430s because I could just solder the chips straight into a stripboard.
I guess I could put the dev board straight into the project, but that's hardly practical really. I'll probably just bit the bullet and see how it goes, there's not much to lose.

Well you can buy the chips individually and incorporate them into your design that way, these are mainly for development/prototype use.

[Jon86]

What I mean is it's difficult to incorporate the chips into small one-off projects when they're in a small surface mount package, I'd probably have to send off for a PCB each time.

[andersm]

As for development, I learnt the hard way that using the serial interface/uploader etc. is a major pain in the ass as there is no way to debug the running code other then provide some kind of visual feedback.

The old-fashioned way to debug was to run a debug stub on the device, communicating with the remote debugger over a serial port or similar interface. It's not as robust as JTAG, but still a useful technique.

[dannyf]

the awkward packages (for me at least).

LQFP, especially in 0.5 pitch, is very easy to solder - it does take some practice to get started.

[Jon86]

the awkward packages (for me at least).

LQFP, especially in 0.5 pitch, is very easy to solder - it does take some practice to get started.

That's reassuring, I'd definitely need to buy myself a new soldering Iron, but I really should do that anyway.
I'll probably give it a shot then

[gmb42]

I just tried to place a order from them, and when I got redirected to their payment page, they wanted $30 or more for shipping! For an item that costs less than $10!
I'm probably going to be going for TI then, as far as I know they don't charge for shipping. I could've bought from farnell or somewhere else, but they still charge way too much for shipping. Bastards.

Preusming you're in the UK, Farnell (UK) offer them at reasonable prices, £6.78 for an F0, £10.85 for a F407 and £16.64 for the F429 with LCD (all prices ex VAT).  Spend more than £20 (just top up the order with another board or bits and bobs) and the £3.95 handling charge disappears.

[gnif]

What I mean is it's difficult to incorporate the chips into small one-off projects when they're in a small surface mount package, I'd probably have to send off for a PCB each time.

Ah, understood. Perhaps these would be of help, not sure if you would want to keep these around either though:

http://www.futurlec.com/SMD_Adapters.shtml

The STM32F103RET6 is a LQFP-64 package.

[quint]

As for development, I learnt the hard way that using the serial interface/uploader etc. is a major pain in the ass as there is no way to debug the running code other then provide some kind of visual feedback. You will save yourself a world of pain if you get yourself a USB JTAG interface and use OpenOCD which supports the STM32 range of devices. This allows you to debug your code on the device, set breakpoints, step the code, inspect registers/ram, etc.

One of the nice features of the Discovery boards is that they come with a built in flash loader/debugger called STLINK V2.  This allows for programming and interactive debugging (via Eclipse or gdb etc) via USB.  OpenOCD supports STLINK V2 but a simpler program to use is stlink (https://github.com/texane/stlink) which is easy to set up on Linux, Mac or Windows.  The Discovery boards also have headers and jumpers which make it easy to use a Discovery board to program and debug other boards.  So they end up being some of the cheapest SWD programmer/debugger dongles you can buy, even if you don't use the on board STM32 target chip.

I'd also recommend ChibiOS (http://chibios.org) which is a nice RTOS which supports the Discovery boards very well. 

[edavid]

Those boards look pretty good, I'll definitely consider those.
The only thing that's pushing me away from these devices is the awkward packages (for me at least).
I want to make a load of projects with microcontrollers, but it's going to be a huge pain in the ass to keep ordering PCBs for a simple little project. I loved the MSP430s because I could just solder the chips straight into a stripboard.
I guess I could put the dev board straight into the project, but that's hardly practical really. I'll probably just bit the bullet and see how it goes, there's not much to lose.

There are 2 ARM CPUs available in DIP packages:

NXP LPC810M021FN8 - ARM Cortex M0 4KB/1KB DIP8
NXP LPC1114FN28/102 - ARM Cortex M0 50MHz 32KB/4KB DIP28

If they are of interest, you should get probably get an LPCXpresso board...

[Jon86]

What I mean is it's difficult to incorporate the chips into small one-off projects when they're in a small surface mount package, I'd probably have to send off for a PCB each time.

Ah, understood. Perhaps these would be of help, not sure if you would want to keep these around either though:

http://www.futurlec.com/SMD_Adapters.shtml

The STM32F103RET6 is a LQFP-64 package.

Thanks, that's the sort of thing I was looking for 

Those boards look pretty good, I'll definitely consider those.
The only thing that's pushing me away from these devices is the awkward packages (for me at least).
I want to make a load of projects with microcontrollers, but it's going to be a huge pain in the ass to keep ordering PCBs for a simple little project. I loved the MSP430s because I could just solder the chips straight into a stripboard.
I guess I could put the dev board straight into the project, but that's hardly practical really. I'll probably just bit the bullet and see how it goes, there's not much to lose.

There are 2 ARM CPUs available in DIP packages:

NXP LPC810M021FN8 - ARM Cortex M0 4KB/1KB DIP8
NXP LPC1114FN28/102 - ARM Cortex M0 50MHz 32KB/4KB DIP28

If they are of interest, you should get probably get an LPCXpresso board...

Haha that's brilliant, an ARM CPU in a DIP-8 package! I'll definitely have to give those a go too!

[dannyf]

an ARM CPU in a DIP-8 package

Not terribly useful, in my experience.

[Jon86]

an ARM CPU in a DIP-8 package

Not terribly useful, in my experience.

Well 6 IO pins is never going to be that great, but I guess it could be fun to use.