STM32F4Discovery

3 Articles

Embed With Elliot: ARM Makefile Madness

March 22, 2016 by 47 Comments

To wrap up my quick tour through the wonderland of make and makefiles, we’re going to look at a pair of possible makefiles for building ARM projects. Although I’m specifically targeting the STM32F407, the chip on a dev board that I have on my desk, it’s reasonably straightforward to extend these to any of the ST ARM chips, and only a bit more work to extend it to any ARM processor.

If you followed along in the first two installments of this series, I demonstrated some basic usages of make that heavily leveraged the built-in rules. Then, we extended these rules to cross-compile for the AVR series of microcontrollers. Now we’re going to tackle a more complicated chip, and that’s going to mean compiling with support libraries. While not required, it’s a lot easier to get an LED blinking on the ARM platforms with some additional help.

One of the main contributions of an IDE like Arduino or mbed or similar is the ease of including external libraries through pull-down menus. If you’ve never built a makefile-based project before, you might be surprised how it’s not particularly more difficult to add libraries to your project.
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Swapping Dev Board Crystals To Suit Your Needs

March 21, 2015 by 18 Comments

Microcontroller Dev Boards have the main hardware choices already made for you so you can jump right into the prototyping by adding peripherals and writing code. Some of the time they have everything you need, other times you can find your own workarounds, but did you ever try just swapping out components to suit? [Andy Brown] documented his process of transplanting the clock crystal on an STM32F4 Discovery board.

Even if you don’t need to do this for yourself, the rework process he documented in the clip after the break is fun to watch. He starts by cleaning the through-hole joints of the crystal oscillator with isopropyl alcohol and then applies some flux paste to each. From there the rest is all hot air. The crystal nearly falls out due to gravity but at the end he needs to pluck it out with his fingers. We’re happy to see others using this “method” as we always feel like it’s a kludge when we do it. Next he grabs the load caps with a pair of tweezers after the briefest of time under the heat.

We’d like to have a little bit of insight on the parts he replaces and we’re hoping there are a few crystal oscillator experts who can leave a comment below. [Andy] calculates a pair of 30pf load caps for this crystal. We understand the math but he mentions a common value for board and uC input capacitance:

assuming the commonly quoted CP + CI = 6pF

So we asked and [Andy] was kind enough to share his background on the topic:

It’s a general “rule of thumb” for FR4 that the stray capacitance due to the traces on the board and the input (lead) capacitance of the the MCU is in in the range of 4-8pF. I’m used to quoting the two separately (CP,CI) but if you look around you’ll see that most people will combine the two and call it just “CP” and quote a value somewhere between 4 and 8pF. It’s all very “finger in the air” and for general purpose MCU clocks you can get away picking the mid-value and be done with it.

That leaves just one other question; the original discovery board had an in-line resistor on one of the crystal traces which he replaces with a zero ohm jumper. Is it common to include a resistor and what is the purpose for it?

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Brute Forcing An Android Phone

November 10, 2013 by 67 Comments

[Brett’s] girlfriend is very concerned about cell phone security — So much so that she used a PIN so secure, even she couldn’t remember it.

Beyond forgetting the PIN, the phone also had encryption enabled, the bootloader locked, and zero permissions for the Android Device Manager to change the PIN. Lucky for her, [Brett] had purchased an STM32F4Discovery Development Board a few months ago, and was itching for a suitable project for it.

Now unfortunately, Android allows you to pick a PIN of anywhere between 4 and 8 digits, which as you can guess, results in a massive number of possible permutations. She was pretty sure it was only 6 digits, and that she didn’t use a 1, 2, or 3… and she thought it started with a 4 or a 7… and she didn’t think any of the digits were repeated… This helped narrow it down a bit, from 1 million possibilities to about 5,000 — assuming all of the boundary conditions she remembers are in fact correct.

[Brett] started by writing a C library to generate permutations of the PIN, testing the board on his own phone to make sure it works with a known PIN, and boom, they were in business.

28,250 PIN attempts later, they decided they were not. Did we mention you can only enter 5 PINs in every 30 seconds?

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