You’ve probably noticed that day by day, and more complex hardware gets closer to a user. Of course, I am talking about microcontrollers and processors. Several years ago, it was a challenge to have running Linux on board. Now almost everyone has Raspberry Pi and doing crazy things. As I have noticed, not many hobbyists are building their boards to get things done. There is a wide variety of ready-made developing boards depending on size, speed, price that it looks not worth spending time on what’s already done. Everyone seems to be grabbing Arduino and building amazing projects. In a couple of years, enthusiasts used to crunch ARM projects like cookies. This is thanks to the choice of cheap development boards and improving free software tools. But the most critical role in this is the manufacturers. They finally noticed that the hobby market could be a powerful driving mechanism. Ignoring it means losing the game.
Now almost every hardware company is trying to get their development board closer to the maker and hacker community because they like to build stuff and spread the word about it.
A great example of easy-to-use development boards is STMicroelectronics Discovery boards. They come with a debugger/programmer built inside. You don’t have to scratch your head how to flash memory or how to debug your program. We have previously made a couple of posts on setting up free development tools and writing applications for ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers. ARM Cortex-M3 are already powerful microcontrollers, but eventually, you may find yourself at some point when you need more processing speed or features. Then it would help if you started looking for a more powerful microcontroller like STM32F407VGT6.
STM has a great development board featuring this microcontroller – STM32F4Discovery. It packs several great features that may give you a stimulus for new great projects. This is an ARM Cortex-M4F core microcontroller that extends the Cortex-M3 series with DSP instruction and floating-point unit. The floating-point unit supports single-precision floating-point numbers and can perform calculations efficiently. This feature gives more room to develop intensive routines related to floating-point data processing. Another feature that comes with Cortex-M4 is DSP functionality. Here you can experiment with DSP routines effectively. You could write DSP functions for Cortex-M3, but imagine that it would take like 7 cycles to perform a single dot product calculation. With the DSP feature, it can be done with a single cycle.
STM32F4discovery board already comes with several handy external components that allow experimenting without melting any solder. There are a couple of user buttons where one of them is reset, four user LEDs, and three for indicating power and communication status. It has 3 axes digital accelerometer. If you need to test DSP skills, there is a MEMS microphone and DAC with a D class amplifier. You can capture sounds, filter with DSP algorithms, and hear them on audio output without significant setup. If you need a master USB, there is also a USB OTG. All I/O pins are available as in all discovery boards. Chip Flash memory size is 1MB. RAM is 196KB, and the processor can be clocked at 168MHz. Price is ridiculous for such functionality.
If you would like to try different boards or add extension modules like touch screen LCD or camera to existing, Farnell has quite a list of these.