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Project demo on STM32F103RBT6 using GCC

STM32F103R board is a simple and easy development board to learn STM32 microcontroller programming. Its heart is an STM32F103RBT6 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with 128K of Flash and 20K of SRAM memory. It can be clocked at the maximum 72MHz frequency and considered a medium-density performance line microcontroller. Other features include USB, CAN, seven timers, 2ADCs, and nine communication interfaces. The Development board has several excellent features to get started. First of all, it has an RS232 interface for communicating and accessing the bootloader. There also is a USB 2.0 full-speed interface connector that also can work as the power supply. Next is a JTAG connector to program microcontroller using tools like a J-Link adapter. Two pushbuttons and two programmable LEDs are hardwired to MCU pins alongside all I/Os connectors.

Driving Graphical LCD with STM32F103ZET6

STM32F103ZET6 board comes with 3.2 inches graphical LCD which features an ILI9320 controller. Equipped LCD is capable of displaying 252144 colors when driven in 18-bit mode. We are going to run it in 16-bit mode, so we are limiting it to 65K colors. LCD driver is based on the existing code found on the internet, originally developed for the STM3210E board. Only minor modifications were needed, like assigning the proper control pins.

Connecting STM32 USART to standard I/O streams in GCC

In many situations, when working with STM32 microcontrollers, you will want to output text strings. There is no need to write specialized functions that output specially formatted strings as it is hard to keep up with various cases. It is convenient to use standard I/O streams and their library functions that allow sending formatted data streams. Arm GCC toolchain comes with the newlib C library from Redhat, so it isn’t specially designed for the embedded toolchain. To use stdio functions, we have to take care of several syscals so-called “stub functions.” These functions usually are provided by operating systems like you would write C programs in Windows or Linux. In our case, we aren’t using any OS, so to avoid error messages while compiling, we have to provide these function declarations where most of them are dummy implementations. It’s not something new pick one that you find on the internet. I noticed that it was written for STM32 Discovery. I named it newlib_stubs.c and placed it in the startup directory. Among system functions implementations like _write(), _fstat(), etc., there are also USARTs assigned to standard streams:

Interrupt based button read on STM32F103ZET6 board

In the previous example, we implemented a simple demo program that reads buttons by continually checking their status in the main program loop. This isn’t an efficient and convenient way to do that. Imagine your application has to do lots of tasks, and in between, you also need to check button status – mission becomes impossible unless you use interrupts. In this part, we briefly introduce to STM32F10x interrupt system and write example code where LEDs and buttons are serviced within interrupts. ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers have an advanced interrupt system that is pretty easily manageable. All interrupts are controlled inside Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller (NVIC), close to the Cortex core, to ensure low latency and robust performance. Main features of NVIC include:

Implementing buttons on STM32F103ZET6

Last time we have made a good starting point with setting up a project template for the STM32F103ZET6 development board using GNU tools. Using the same project template, we can move forward and start programming other elements. This time a quick note about adding a button library. This is a modest implementation that initializes port pins and then reads their status. The Development board is equipped with four user-programmable buttons named WAKEUP, TAMPER, USER1, and USER2. We will not care about the meaning of names; use them as general-purpose buttons for now.

LED blinky demo on STM32F103ZET6 development board

I found some time to play with the STM32F103ZET6 development board and decided to set up a simple project for it. The trickiest part of this is to set up a project environment that would serve as a template for the following developments. Many ARM developers chose the CodeSourcery Lite edition toolchain. It has full command line functionality – this is what we usually need. If you want some alternative – you can select gnu yagarto ARM toolchain, which is also great and free. No matter which tool you select, the code will work on both. Let’s stick to CodeSourcery. Just download it and install it on your PC. As we said Lite version supports only command-line tools – we need an interface for it. Eclipse IDE is one of the favorite choices, so that we will grab this one too. Yagarto website has an excellent tutorial on how to set up the Eclipse IDE in a step-by-step manner. We won’t go into details with this.

New STM32F103ZET6 development board with 3.2″ TFT Touch LCD

The latest development board has just arrived. I thought it would be nice to push things more towards the ARM cortex-M3 playground. This an STMicroelectronics STM32F103ZET6 ARM Cortex – M3 MCU based development board with a 3.2” Touch LCD screen. This is a high – density performance line 32 -bit MCU featuring internal 512K of FLASH memory, 64K of RAM. It is rich in peripherals like USB, CAB, 11 timers, 3ADC, and many communication interfaces. The microcontroller seems to be powerful enough to run quite intensive tasks, but more memory is populated on board. Additionally, there are: