After playing around with AVR for a while, I have decided that ARM is the platform I want to really hone my C skills on. I have come to this decision mainly due to their advanced capabilities (clock speeds) and peripherals. I have downloaded CoIDE, which looks to be a very user friendly IDE to start on; I also tried out Keil uVision, but did not find that as intuitive. I have sorted my toolchain as well. However, I have some questions I would like to ask before I make the required purchases. I am thinking of buying (from eBay) some cheap dev boards for about £3 each (they all use the STM32F103C8T6), a £3 ST-LINK knock off and a £7 J-LINK J-TAG programmer; I'm aware I could make do with just the ST-LINK, but there's no harm in getting something else for a sanity check.
So my main question is how do I use the GPIO on this? On the AVR, it is so easy to just manipulate the bits in a register. What libraries do I need to flash an LED, if any? Is it possible to directly manipulate the pins in such a simple way? I know these questions must make you laugh, but I just can't find the information anywhere. I'd rather not splash out for a dev board from TI or STM, and I should mention that my only avenues for purchase are eBay and Amazon. If anyone can help me out, I'd be very grateful.
Kind regards,
JackP