Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 7 replies
  • Subscribers 7 subscribers
  • Views 1401 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

STM32F4 Discovery open-source development software

Former Member

I don't know if ST are planning to offer support for the open source GNU toolchain for STM32 (as used by Raisonance RIDE7), as they do for other products.  But it can be made to work if you are prepared to hack your own makefiles and linker scripts.  I just got the LCD, Touchscreen and Ethernet examples running, built on my Ubuntu Linux workstation with the arm-none-eabi-gcc toolchain and the openocd debugger (yes, openocd does support SWD, and they are even available on Windows).  I won't say it was instant, it took a week or so of learning curve, but I didn't have to part with any hard-earned cash. I even got the Discovery board set 'free' under the Power Circuit rewards scheme after my last project.

 

Once I'd found all the files and got the typos out of the scripts, it did what it says on the tin ( and no crippleware size limits to worry about).

 

It would be a shame if such a wonderfully low-cost development system lost its potential to lower the entry bar for designers by restricting it to $1000-plus software systems.  Allright for those that already have them: a few years ago I coughed up for a development system for the uPSD series, only to find their FS USB was seriously buggy, and to have ST pull the plug the following year.  So I'm naturally cautious.

 

Me, I'm looking forward to designing some ethernet-enabled instruments.

Parents

  • I hust got OpenOCD running on the STM32L discovery board as well.  There is a bug in the stm32lx.cfg driver.  My Discovery board has a C-suffix (256k) chip. For this and larger chips, the Flash Size parameter (F_SIZE) is moved from 0x1FF8004C to 0x1FF800CC, and OpenOCD has yet to catch up.  As a workround you can either patch the script or patch the driver (src/flash/nor/stm32lx.c) and rebuild. The config line required is

    flash bank $_FLASHNAME stm32lx 0x08000000 0x00040000 0 0 $_TARGETNAME

    Also it struggles to connect, talking to the debug port while the processor is running seems to cause problems, I always have to halt the processor before loading else I get errors (this appleis to the F4 as well as the L).  Sometimes it won't connect unless I hold down the reset button while OpenOCD reads the parameters.

     

    Tim

Reply

  • I hust got OpenOCD running on the STM32L discovery board as well.  There is a bug in the stm32lx.cfg driver.  My Discovery board has a C-suffix (256k) chip. For this and larger chips, the Flash Size parameter (F_SIZE) is moved from 0x1FF8004C to 0x1FF800CC, and OpenOCD has yet to catch up.  As a workround you can either patch the script or patch the driver (src/flash/nor/stm32lx.c) and rebuild. The config line required is

    flash bank $_FLASHNAME stm32lx 0x08000000 0x00040000 0 0 $_TARGETNAME

    Also it struggles to connect, talking to the debug port while the processor is running seems to cause problems, I always have to halt the processor before loading else I get errors (this appleis to the F4 as well as the L).  Sometimes it won't connect unless I hold down the reset button while OpenOCD reads the parameters.

     

    Tim

Children
  • in reply to Former Member

    Glad you got it working Tim! I'm doing things a bit differently, I've got a Black Magic Mini (http://www.blacksphere.co.nz/main/blackmagic) which basically has GDB inside of it, so you (in theory, the test will be wednesday when my cable arrives) attach this to the SWD lines, connect the USB port to your machine, poof! it shows up as a serial port, you start up GDB and connect to it. From that point on you just load in the software to test and go.

     

    I put up my simple blink script (https://github.com/ChuckM/minimal-blink) but have switched to using libopencm3 as a base. Currently working on FSMC support (its not in the library yet so I'm adding my take on it) and then to get the LCD running (which uses the FSMC to interface). Currently things hang in the FSMC setup stuff so that will be my next debugging step.

     

    At some point I hope to have a simple LCD graphics library for this thing too.

    --Chuck