STM32 Clones: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

October 22, 2020 by Maya Posch 90 Comments

Whenever a product becomes popular, it’s only a matter of time before other companies start feeling the urge to hitch a ride on this popularity. This phenomenon is the primary reason why so many terrible toys and video games have been produced over the years. Yet it also drives the world of electronics. Hence it should come as no surprise that ST’s highly successful ARM-based series of microcontrollers (MCUs) has seen its share of imitations, clones and outright fakes.

The fakes are probably the most problematic, as those chips pretend to be genuine STM32 parts down to the markings on the IC package, while compatibility with the part they are pretending to be can differ wildly. For the imitations and clones that carry their own markings, things are a bit more fuzzy, as one could reasonably pretend that those companies just so happened to have designed MCUs that purely by coincidence happen to be fully pin- and register compatible with those highly popular competing MCU designs. That would be the sincerest form of flattery.

Let’s take a look at which fakes and imitations are around, and what it means if you end up with one. Continue reading “STM32 Clones: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” →

STM32 Blue Pill Turned GPG Security Token

June 10, 2020 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

Feeling the cost of commercial options like the YubiKey and Nitrokey were too high, [TheStaticTurtle] started researching DIY alternatives. He found an open source project allows the STM32F103 to act as a USB cryptographic token for GNU Privacy Guard, which was a start. All he had to do was build a suitable device to install it on.

The first step was to test the software out on the popular “Blue Pill” development board, which [TheStaticTurtle] documents in the write-up should anyone want to give it a try themselves. The ST-Link V2 was already a supported target, so it only took some relatively minor tweaks to get running and add support for a simple push button. The output of gpg --card-status showed the device was working as expected, so with the software sorted, it was time to take a closer look at the hardware.

To create his “TurtleAuth” dongle, [TheStaticTurtle] started with the basic layout of the Blue Pill and added in a TTP223E touch control IC. The original Micro USB port was also swapped for a male USB-A connector so the device could be plugged directly into a computer. An upper PCB, containing the status LEDs and touch pad, was then designed so it would fit over the main board as an enclosure of sorts. While the sides are still open, the device looks robust enough to handle life in a laptop bag at least.

While it’s not exactly a common project, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody spin up their own hardware token. More evidence of what the dedicated individual can accomplish these days on a relatively limited budget.

Bus Sniffing Leads To New Display For Vintage Casio

March 8, 2020 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Despite his best efforts to repair the LCD on his Casio FX-702P, it soon became clear to [Andrew Menadue] that it was a dead-end. Rather than toss this relatively valuable device in the trash, he wondered if would be possible to replace the LCD with a more modern display. Knowing that reverse engineering the LCD panel itself would be quite a challenge, he decided instead to focus his efforts on decoding the communications between the calculator’s processor and display controller.

With his logic analyzer connected to the Casio’s four bit bus [Andrew] was able to capture a sequence of bytes during startup that looked promising, although it didn’t quite make sense at first. He had to reverse the order of each nibble, pair them back up into bytes, and then consult the FX-702P’s character map as the device doesn’t use ASCII. This allowed him to decode the message “READY”, and proved the concept was viable.

Of course a calculator with a logic analyzer permanently attached to it isn’t exactly ideal, so he started work on something a bit more compact. Armed with plenty of display controller data dumps, [Andrew] wrote some code for a STM32 “Blue Pill” ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller that would sniff and decode the data in near real-time. In the video after the break you can see there’s a slight delay between when he pushes a button and when the corresponding character comes up on the LCD below, but it’s certainly usable.

Unfortunately, the hardware he’s created for this hack is just slightly too large to fit inside the calculator proper. The new LCD is also nowhere near the size and shape that would be required to replace the original one. But none of that really matters. While [Andrew] says he could certainly make the electronics smaller, the goal was never to restore the calculator to like-new condition. Sometimes it’s more about the journey than the destination.

Continue reading “Bus Sniffing Leads To New Display For Vintage Casio” →

Blue Pill Makes Cheap But Powerful Morse Tutor

August 7, 2019 by Al Williams 2 Comments

[W8BH] attended a talk by another ham, [W8TEE] that showed a microcontroller sending and receiving Morse code. He decided to build his own, and documented his results in an 8 part tutorial. He’s using the Blue Pill board and the resulting device sends code with paddles, sends canned text, provides an LCD with a rotary knob menu interface, and even has an SD card for data storage.

All the code is on GitHub. If you are interested in Morse code or in learning how to write a pretty substantial application using the Blue Pill and the Arduino IDE (or any other similar processor), this is a great exposition that is also a practical tool.

Continue reading “Blue Pill Makes Cheap But Powerful Morse Tutor” →

Text Projector With — You Know — Lasers

February 14, 2019 by Al Williams 9 Comments

We missed [iliasam’s] laser text projector when it first appeared, perhaps because the original article was in Russian. However, he recently reposted in English and it really caught our eye. You can see a short video of it in operation, below.

The projector uses raster scanning where the beam goes over each spot in a grid pattern. The design uses one laser from a cheap laser pointer and a salvaged mirror module from an old laser printer. The laser pointer diode turned out to be a bit weak, so a DVD laser was eventually put into service. A DVD motor also provides the vertical scan which is just a slight wobble of a mirror. A Blue Pill CPU provides all the smarts. You can find the code on GitHub.

Continue reading “Text Projector With — You Know — Lasers” →

Do Other Things Besides Output Video

January 15, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

Small microcontrollers and tiny systems-on-chips are getting more and more popular these days as the price comes down and the ease of programming goes up. A Raspberry Pi is relatively inexpensive and can do pretty much everything you need, but not every chip out there can do something most of us take for granted like output video. For a lot of platforms, it’s next to impossible to do while saving any processor or memory for other tasks besides the video output itself.

[Dave] aka [Mubes] has been working on the Blue Pill platform which is a STM32F103C8 board. While they don’t natively output video, it’s a feature that provides a handy tool to have for debugging in order to see what’s going on in your code. However, if the video code takes up all of the processor power and memory there’s not much point. [Dave]’s video output program, on the other hand, takes up only 1200 bytes of RAM and 24% of the processor for a 50×18 text display over VGA, leaving a lot of room left for whatever else you need the tiny board to do.

Video output on a device this small and lightweight is an impressive feat, especially while saving room for other tasks. This brings it firmly out of the realm of novelty and into the space of useful tools to keep around. If you want to try the same thing on an ATtiny, though, you might have to come up with some more impressive tricks.

Continue reading “Do Other Things Besides Output Video” →