What do you think of this STM32 toolchain - 10 software installations ?

[rstofer]

Where did they come from?

[ez24]

Where did they come from?

Give me awhile to try and figure out where.  I am sure they came from the 10 installations
thanks

[westfw]

(from a book)

I think the main problem is that there is a lot of churn in development environment - if it takes ten separate downloads to get going, someone will notice, and perhaps make it easier.  But that makes older documentation inaccurate.  For example, the preferred procedures for installing 3rd party Arduino libraries is on at least their third version, and you can find lots of web-based instructions (and even actual libraries) that just don't work any more.

Keeping up with such changes is HARD, and it's even more difficult if you're talking about "book format" rather than online content.

[ebclr]

Your board is mbed compatible

Just go here

https://www.mbed.com/en/development/hardware/boards/st/nucleo_f401re/

Register your seld and your board and open the blink sample

[ebclr]

The program will be simple as that

#include "mbed.h"

DigitalOut myled(LED1);

int main() {
    while(1) {
        myled = 1; // LED is ON
        wait(0.2); // 200 ms
        myled = 0; // LED is OFF
        wait(1.0); // 1 sec
    }
}

[ebclr]

After that unplug and re-plug your board. A new drive like "a pen drive" will appear on your windows system just drag and drop on this drive the bin file that is downloaded automatically when you compile on mbed(  The driver label will be nucleo ) and is done green Led  LD2 flashing

Tested with 3 different Nucleo boards

L152RE
F411RE
F072Rb

[janoc]

Here's my advice. Keep items 1-5 in your list. Replace #6 with a Segger J-Link. Dump items 7-10.

The Eclipse/CDT/J-link tool chain is all you need to so serious, professional-level development work on ARM processors. It's all free except for the J-Link, and that's only $60 if you are not doing commercial work.

I do wonder why the Segger? Nothing against it, but the Nucleos come with a built-in ST Link debugger that works just fine. Well, maybe except for the programming via mass storage - that is a hit & miss gimmick for mBed crowd, but  there is no need to use that. It can be even used to debug/program offboard targets in a pinch too.

The Nucleos work with either STLink or OpenOCD bridge software. I have posted the instructions (for a different Nucleo, but they all work pretty much the same) here:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/arm-starting-platform/msg988123/#msg988123

The tutorials how to set all this up are all over the internet, it just takes a short googling. If you are using the GNU ARM plugin for Eclipse, it will even do most of that setup for you.

I would rather spend the $60 on something more useful, like a cheap logic analyzer, for example.

[nctnico]

Having read the Segger versus other debuggers and my own experience with on-target debugger I'd say it would be well worth the money to get a good & stable debugging tool. My experience in the past decades has turned me away from using on-target (JTAG) debugging because it never worked reliable for me and I ended up wasting more time trying to get the debugging environment to work than just fixing the bug using other methods.

[janoc]

Having read the Segger versus other debuggers and my own experience with on-target debugger I'd say it would be well worth the money to get a good & stable debugging tool. My experience in the past decades has turned me away from using on-target (JTAG) debugging because it never worked reliable for me and I ended up wasting more time trying to get the debugging environment to work than just fixing the bug using other methods.

Your argument is okay for the generic case, but here we are talking specifically the ST's Nucleo devboards. With the external Segger dongle you are going to have to modify the board, because they don't have an SWD/JTAG header brought out - the lines are connected to the on-board debugger. So you are basically only adding extra complexity to your problem for no reason.

ST Link is a proven system, it is a generic SWD/JTAG debugger that also comes as a separate dongle, if you prefer. ST adds it to all of their Nucleo and Discovery devboards so that you can just plug an USB cable in and don't need anything extra.