We think [Karl Lunt] has a point when he says that the STM32 Discovery Boards are cool and inexpensive, yet not hobby friendly. But it’s nothing that a little big of creativity can’t solve. Above are pictured three of the hacks he used to tame the Discovery boards.
The first is the addition of a microSD card adapter. He soldered wirewrap wire to each of the contacts on the adapter. He recommends a low iron setting to make sure you don’t melt the plastic adapter housing. He then used double stick foam tape to adhere it to the bottom of the dev board. The other ends of the wire are wrapped around the appropriate pins on the dual-row pin header. Similarly, the UART3 connections are broken out from the pin headers to that white quick connect socket. This lets him access serial data without having to solve the USB issues that were vexing him.
Finally, he made his own daughter board to break out the dual row headers into screw terminals. We’ve been hit with problems interfacing hardware with the board’s native connections — jumpering to IDE cables just never worked reliably. This breakout board not only makes it simple, but organizes the pins into groups based on their alternate functions.
Do you remember seeing the hacksaw version of this Discovery board which gives you two dev boards for the price of one?
“…a little big of creativity…” B^)
There are at least four different breakout boards on the market that do exactly the same thing. ST, Waveshare and Embest all have boards, and there are more on ebay. I save my handmade prototyping for the circuitry that I can’t buy.
The Waveshare boards are great and inexpensive except sometimes their pin assignments leave something to be desired. However by moving jumpers and adding jumper wires you can change the pinouts to whatever you want.
It doesn’t solve the real problem of being hobbyist unfriendly: the proprietary IDE is crap, and the compiler is severely crippled.
You don’t have to use proprietary IDE. I’m using stm32f4 board with GNU toolchain on Linux and didn’t have any problems with it so far.
Is this the site you used to install GCC toolchain and get the STM32F401 Discovery board to work? http://jeremyherbert.net/get/stm32f4_getting_started
Fantastic information posted! Really nice posts. Awesome work!