My first ARM-STM32F4 discovery

[Wond3rboy]

Hello

I am sooo excited!! I have recently purchased my first ARM board. It is the STM32F4 discovery kit with the STM32F407 chip.

I have downloaded Keil for development purposes. I wanted to know if there is any simulator for this (Proteus like). I have Proteus 8.0 in my university but I couldn't find the microcontroller in there. This would really help me a lot in learning as well as developing courses in the future. Also, is there any specific resource more experienced people would suggest. I have found

http://stm32f4-discovery.com/

I have also been checking out st.com too.

Also, I would like to use a tool with which I couldn't move between different ARM families (such as Cortex M3) is Keil the right choice? I am talking about having something similar to what we have for XC8 compiler for all 8-bit PICs, do we have such a tool for Cortex M3 and M4 specifically?

Thanks

 

[DirtyLude]

I do not have much experience with STM32. I've mainly been using LPC's. You will find the world of Cortex M0, M3, and M4's is much more fractured than your PIC experience. There are many manufacturers, many manufacturer supported coding environments. If you want easy multi chip support, you can pay for it. Keil and IAR are commercial products and I would only stick with them if you aren't going over the limitation or don't mind spending multi thousands on a license. Otherwise there are some cheaper IDE's based on GCC for ARM, like Atolic, and Rowley Crossworks. I am currently using Rowley Crossworks with a hobby license, which has no code limitation, just no commercial use. I have heard about Coocox CooIDE, but never tried it.

I was reading someone on another forum tried out building Eclipse with GCC and found it to be pretty good lately. I tried it many years ago and found putting it together way too complicated and it was a big mess. I might try it again myself.

 

[Wond3rboy]

Hello Mark

Oh! Thanks for your insight on this. I have downloaded Keil and installed the required pieces to get it working (what I think was required). I prefer Keil since I am familiar with the environment from my 8051 days. The problem was that I couldn't get anything structured to get started with the board but found a course at Auburn university. Hopefully will be able to get up and running with it soon. I will ask if I get stuck.

To tell you the truth, I favored STM's since they are cheaper (the cheapest of the lot I could find with the local shipper). Also, I convinced my department head to order more of these so hopefully I will be able to use these in one of the microcontroller courses I run

 

[jjw]

I bought a few weeks ago stm32f401 board and have just got a little experience in mbed environment
https://developer.mbed.org
Mbed is easy to use, but to get to the hardware register level ( if needed ) needs a lot of reading.

Edit: The board is stm32f401 Nucleo, which is a mbed enabled.