[Scot Kornak] got his hands on the new STM32 Discovery Board. He got his as a free giveaway, but at only $18 he probably would have picked one up anyway. His one complaint about the device is that he dual pin-headers which break out the ARM processor’s pins are not the most convenient for hooking up external components. He decided to make his own breakout board which would give him a more robust solution for the components he uses all the time.
The protoboard that he chose as a base is quite interesting. It’s made for interfacing DIL pin headers just like the ones on the STM32F4 Discovery board. Each row of the dual header is carried down the board perpendicular to those headers. [Scot] cut the traces underneath the STM32 board to isolate the right and left sides. He then added RS232 hardware to one side, while including another pair of DIL headers to break out the rest of the unused pins.
This is all he’s got so far, but there’s plenty of room on the base board to add more as the need arises.
Yo dawg I made a breakout board for your breakout board so you can breakout while you breakout.
Nice. I’ve got the low power STM32 board, as well as the new F4, and a breakout^2 board like this would be so useful.
Why can’t you use this top part of goldpins? I mean the shorter ones
I still lack the skill to program mine without proprietary compilers
i heard you like breakout boards. so we put a breakout board, on your breakout board.
But…RS232…? Twice?
I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a snippy comment about the Arduino shield for the Arduino yet.
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O wait :-D
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On a serious note though, does anyone have a good recommendation as to a book/resource that would be a good first primer for someone looking into working with the ARM chips? There is a lot of hobbyist/amateur level work and information about the AVR and Microchip PIC microcontrollers, but there is much less material which is suited for relative newbies out there when it comes to these chips.
These very inexpensive breakout boards seem like an excellent way to get one’s feet wet with relatively high powered chips.
Mines is better :)
http://atomsoft.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/stm32f4-male-to-female/
as a test:
http://atomsoft.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/stm32f4-with-char-lcd/
But i like his green version
Yo dawg, I heard you like breakout boards, so we put a breakout board in yo breakout board so you can . . . BREAKOUTTTTTT!!!!
Why couldn’t they add an Ethernet PHY chip on this board :(