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Writing reusable USB device descriptors with some XML, Python, and C

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A recent project required me to reuse (once again) my USB HID device driver. This is my third or fourth project using this and I had started to find it annoying to need to hand-modify a heavily-commented, self-referencing array of uint8_t’s. I figured there must be a better way, so I decided to try something different.

In this post I will present a script that turns this madness, which lives in a separate file:

Into these comment blocks which can live anywhere in the source and are somewhat more readable:

In most of my projects before this one I would have something like the first script shown above sitting in a file by itself, declaring a bunch of uint8_t arrays and a usb_descriptors[] table constant that would be consumed by my USB driver as it searched for USB descriptors. A header file that exposes the usb_descriptors[] table would also be found in the project. Any USB descriptor that had to be returned by the device would be found in this table. To make things more complex, descriptors like the configuration descriptor have to declare all of the device interfaces and so pieces and parts of each separate USB interface component would be interspersed inside of other descriptors.

I’ve been using this structure for some time after writing my first USB driver after reading through the Teensy driver. This is probably the only structural code that has made it all the way from the Teensy driver into all of my other code.

With this new script I’ve written there’s no more need for manually computing how long a descriptor is or needing to modify the configuration descriptor every time a new interface has been added. All the parts of a descriptor are self-contained in the source file that defines a particular interface and can be easily moved around from project to project.

All the code for this post lives here:

https://github.com/kcuzner/midi-fader

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The IoTree: An internet-connected tree

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For this Christmas I decided to do something fun with my Christmas tree: Hook it up to the internet.

Visit the IoTree here (available through the 1st week of January 2019):

http://kevincuzner.com/iotree

The complete source can be found here:

http://github.com/kcuzner/iotree

The IoTree

The IoTree is an interface that allows anyone to control the pattern of lights shown on the small Christmas tree on my workbench. It consists of the following components:

  • My Kinetis KL26 breakout board (http://github.com/kcuzner/kl2-dev). This controls a string of 50 WS2811 LEDs which are zip-tied to the tree.
  • A Raspberry Pi (mid-2012 vintage) which parses pattern commands coming from the cloud into LED sequences which are downloaded to the KL26 over SPI. It also hosts a webcam and periodically throws the image back up to the cloud so that the masses can see the results of their labors.
  • A cloud server which hosts a Redis instance and python application to facilitate the user interface and communication down to the Raspberry Pi.

I’m going to go into brief detail about each of these pieces and some of the challenges I had with getting everything to work.

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Bootloader for ARM Cortex-M0: No VTOR

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In my most recent project I selected an ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller (the STM32F042). I soon realized that there is a key architectural piece missing from the Cortex-M0 which the M0+ does not have: The vector table offset register (VTOR).

I want to talk about how I overcame the lack of a VTOR to write a USB bootloader which supports a semi-safe fallback mode.

The source for this post can be found here (look in the “bootloader” folder):

https://github.com/kcuzner/midi-fader/tree/master/firmware

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Building a USB bootloader for an STM32

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As my final installment for the posts about my LED Wristwatch project I wanted to write about the self-programming bootloader I made for an STM32L052 and describe how it works. So far it has shown itself to be fairly robust and I haven’t had to get out my STLink to reprogram the watch for quite some time.

The main object of this bootloader is to facilitate reprogramming of the device without requiring a external programmer. There are two ways that a microcontroller can accomplish this generally:

  1. Include a binary image in every compiled program that is copied into RAM and runs a bootloader program that allows for self-reprogramming.
  2. Reserve a section of flash for a bootloader that can reprogram the rest of flash.

Each of these ways has their pros and cons. Option 1 allows for the user program to use all available flash (aside from the blob size and bootstrapping code). It also might not require a relocatable interrupt vector table (something that some ARM Cortex microcontrollers lack). However, it also means that there is no recovery without using JTAG or SWD to reflash the microcontroller if you somehow mess up the switchover into the bootloader. Option 2 allows for a fairly fail-safe bootloader. The bootloader is always there, even if the user program is not working right. So long as the device provides a hardware method for entering bootloader mode, the device can always be recovered. However, Option 2 is difficult to update (you have to flash it with a special program that overwrites the bootloader), wastes unused space in the bootloader-reserved section, and also requires some features that not all microcontrollers have.

Because the STM32L052 has a large amount of flash (64K) and implements the vector-table-offset register (allowing the interrupt vector table to be relocated), I decided to go with Option 2.

Example code for this post can be found here:

https://github.com/kcuzner/led-watch

Contents

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Cross-platform driverless USB: The Human Interface Device

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During my LED Wristwatch project, I decided early on that I wanted to do something different with the way my USB stuff was implemented. In the past, I have almost exclusively used libusb to talk to my devices in terms of raw bulk packets or raw setup requests. While this is ok, it isn’t quite as easy to do once you cross out of the fruited plains of Linux-land into the barren desert of Windows. This project instead made the watch identify itself (enumerate) as a USB Human Interface Device (HID).

What I would like to do in this post is a step-by-step tutorial for modifying a USB device to enumerate as a human interface device. I’ll start with an overview of HID, then move on to modifying the USB descriptors and setting up your device endpoints so that it sends reports, followed by a few notes on writing host software for Windows and Linux that communicates to devices using raw reports. With a little bit of work, you should be able to replace many things done exclusively with libusb with a cross-platform system that requires no drivers.

Example code for this post can be found here:

https://github.com/kcuzner/led-watch

One thing to note is that since I’m using my LED Watch as an example, I’m going to be extending using my API, which I describe a little bit here. The main source code files for this can be found in common/src/usb.c and common/src/usb_hid.c.

Contents

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Bare metal STM32: Writing a USB driver

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A couple years ago I wrote a post about writing a bare metal USB driver for the Teensy 3.1, which uses Freescale Kinetis K20 microcontroller. Over the past couple years I’ve switched over to instead using the STM32 series of microcontrollers since they are cheaper to program the “right” way (the dirt-cheap STLink v2 enables that). I almost always prefer to use the microcontroller IC by itself, rather than building around a development kit since I find that to be much more interesting.

LED Wristwatch with USB

One of my recent (or not so recent) projects was an LED Wristwatch which utilized an STM32L052. This microcontroller is optimized for low power, but contains a USB peripheral which I used for talking to the wristwatch from my PC, both for setting the time and for reflashing the firmware. This was one of my first hobby projects where I designed something without any prior breadboarding (beyond the battery charger circuit). The USB and such was all rather “cross your fingers and hope it works” and it just so happened to work without a problem.

In this post I’m going to only cover a small portion of what I learned from the USB portion of the watch. There will be a further followup on making the watch show up as a HID Device and writing a USB bootloader.

Example code for this post can be found here:

https://github.com/kcuzner/led-watch

(mainly in common/src/usb.c and common/include/usb.h)

My objective here is to walk quickly through the operation of the USB Peripheral, specifically the Packet Memory Area, then talk a bit about how the USB Peripheral does transfers, and move on to how I structured my code to abstract the USB packetizing logic away from the application.

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Arranging components in a circle with Kicad

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I’ve been using kicad for just about all of my designs for a little over 5 years now. It took a little bit of a learning curve, but I’ve really come to love it, especially with the improvements by CERN that came out in version 4. One of the greatest features, in my opinion, is the Python Scripting Console in the PCB editor (pcbnew). It gives (more or less) complete access to the design hierarchy so that things like footprints can be manipulated in a scripted fashion.

In my most recent design, the LED Watch, I used this to script myself a tool for arranging footprints in a circle. What I want to show today was how I did it and how to use it so that you can make your own scripting tools (or just arrange stuff in a circle).

The python console can be found in pcbnew under Tools->Scripting Console.

Step 1: Write the script

When writing a script for pcbnew, it is usually helpful to have some documentation. Some can be found here, though I mostly used “dir” a whole bunch and had it print me the structure of the various things once I found the points to hook in. The documentation is fairly spartan at this point, so that made things easier.

Here’s my script:

There are several arguments to this function: a list of reference designators ([“D1”, “D2”, “D3”] etc), the angle at which the first component should be placed, the position in mils for the center of the circle, and the radius of the circle in mils. Once the function is invoked, it will find all of the components indicated in the reference designator list and arrange them into the desired circle.

Step 2: Save the script

In order to make life easier, it is best if the script is saved somewhere that the pcbnew python interpreter knows where to look. I found a good location at “/usr/share/kicad/scripting/plugins”, but the list of all paths that will be searched can be easily found by opening the python console and executing “import sys” followed by “print(sys.path)”. Pick a path that makes sense and save your script there. I saved mine as “placement_helpers.py” since I intend to add more functions to it as situations require.

Step 3: Open your PCB and run the script

Before you can use the scripts on your footprints, they need to be imported. Make sure you execute the “Read Netlist” command before continuing.

The scripting console can be found under Tools->Scripting Console. Once it is opened you will see a standard python (2) command prompt. If you placed your script in a location where the Scripting Console will search, you should be able to do something like the following:

Now, pcbnew may not recognize that your PCB has changed and enable the save button. You should do something like lay a trace or some other board modification so that you can save any changes the script made. I’m sure there’s a way to trigger this in Python, but I haven’t got around to trying it yet.

Conclusion

Hopefully this brief tutorial will either help you to place components in circles in Kicad/pcbnew or will help you to write your own scripts for easing PCB layout. Kicad can be a very capable tool and with its new expanded scripting functionality, the sky seems to be the limit.

The LED Wristwatch: A (more or less) completed project!

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About 2009 I saw an article written by Dr. Paul Pounds in which he detailed a pocketwatch he had designed that fit inside a standard pocketwatch case and used LEDs as the dial. While the article has since disappeared, the youtube video remains. The wayback machine has a cached version of the page. Anyway, the idea has kind of stuck with me for a while and so a year or so ago I decided that I wanted to build a wristwatch inspired by that idea.

Although the project started out as an AVR project, I decided after my escapades with the STM32 in August that I really wanted to make it an STM32 project, so around November I started making a new design that used the STM32L052C8 ARM Cortex-M0+ ultra-low power USB microcontroller. The basic concept of the design is to mock up an analog watch face using a ring of LEDs for the hours, minutes, and seconds. I found three full rings to be expecting a bit much if I wanted to keep this small, so I ended up using two rings: One for the hours and another for combined minutes and seconds (the second hand is recognized by the fact that it is “moving” perceptibly).

In this post I’m going to go over my general design, some things I was happy with, and some things that I wasn’t happy with. I’ll make some follow-up posts for the following topics:

The complete design files can be found here:

https://github.com/kcuzner/led-watch

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Quick-n-dirty data acquisition with a Teensy 3.1

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The Problem

I am working on a project that involves a Li-Ion battery charger. I’ve never built one of these circuits before and I wanted to test the battery over its entire charge-discharge cycle to make sure it wasn’t going to burst into flame because I set some resistor wrong. The battery itself is very tiny (100mAH, 2.5mm thick) and is going to be powering an extremely low-power circuit, hopefully over the course of many weeks between charges.

Battery Charger

Battery charger breadboard

After about 2 days of taking meter measurements every 6 hours or so to see what the voltage level had dropped to, I decided to try to automate this process. I had my trusty Teensy 3.1 lying around, so I thought that it should be pretty simple to turn it into a simple data logger, measuring the voltage at a very slow rate (maybe 1 measurement per 5 seconds). Thus was born the EZDAQ.

All code for this project is located in the repository at https://github.com/kcuzner/ezdaq

Setting up the Teensy 3.1 ADC

I’ve never used the ADC before on the Teensy 3.1. I don’t use the Teensy Cores HAL/Arduino Library because I find it more fun to twiddle the bits and write the makefiles myself. Of course, this also means that I don’t always get a project working within 30 minutes.

The ADC on the Teensy 3.1 (or the Kinetis MK20DX256) is capable of doing 16-bit conversions at 400-ish ksps. It is also quite complex and can do conversions in many different ways. It is one of the larger and more configurable peripherals on the device, probably rivaled only by the USB module. The module does not come pre-calibrated and requires a calibration cycle to be performed before its accuracy will match that specified in the datasheet. My initialization code is as follows:

Following the recommendations in the datasheet, I selected a clock that would bring the ADC clock speed down to <4MHz and turned on hardware averaging before starting the calibration. The calibration is initiated by setting a flag in ADC0_SC3 and when completed, the calibration results will be found in the several ADC0_CL* registers. I’m not 100% certain how this calibration works, but I believe what it is doing is computing some values which will trim some value in the SAR logic (probably something in the internal DAC) in order to shift the converted values into spec.

One thing to note is that I did not end up using the 16-bit conversion capability. I was a little rushed and was put off by the fact that I could not get it to use the full 0-65535 dynamic range of a 16-bit result variable. It was more like 0-10000. This made figuring out my “volts-per-value” value a little difficult. However, the 12-bit mode gave me 0-4095 with no problems whatsoever. Perhaps I’ll read a little further and figure out what is wrong with the way I was doing the 16-bit conversions, but for now 12 bits is more than sufficient. I’m just measuring some voltages.

Since I planned to measure the voltages coming off a Li-Ion battery, I needed to make sure I could handle the range of 3.0V-4.2V. Most of this is outside the Teensy’s ADC range (max is 3.3V), so I had to make myself a resistor divider attenuator (with a parallel capacitor for added stability). It might have been better to use some sort of active circuit, but this is supposed to be a quick and dirty DAQ. I’ll talk a little more about handling issues spawning from the use of this resistor divider in the section about the host software.

Quick and dirty USB device-side driver

For this project I used my device-side USB driver software that I wrote in this project. Since we are gathering data quite slowly, I figured that a simple control transfer should be enough to handle the requisite bandwidth.

I added a control request (0x01) which uses the wIndex (not to be confused with the cleaning product) value to select a channel to read. The host software can now issue a vendor control request 0x01, setting the wIndex value accordingly, and get the raw value last read from a particular analog channel. In order to keep things easy, I labeled the analog channels using the same format as the standard Teensy 3.1 layout. Thus, wIndex 0 corresponds to A0, wIndex 1 corresponds to A1, and so forth. The adc_get_value function reads the last read ADC value for a particular channel. Sampling is done by the ADC continuously, so the USB read doesn’t initiate a conversion or anything like that. It just reads what happened on the channel during the most recent conversion.

Host software

Since libusb is easy to use with Python, via PyUSB, I decided to write out the whole thing in Python. Originally I planned on some sort of fancy gui until I realized that it would far simpler just to output a CSV and use MATLAB or Excel to process the data. The software is simple enough that I can just put the entire thing here:

Basically, I just use the argparse module to take some command line inputs, find the device using PyUSB, and spit out the requested channel values in a CSV format to stdout every so often.

In addition to simply displaying the data, the program also processes the raw ADC values into some useful voltage values. I contemplated doing this on the device, but it was simpler to configure if I didn’t have to reflash it every time I wanted to make an adjustment. One thing this lets me do is a sort of calibration using the “attenuation” values that I put into the host. The idea with these values is to compensate for a voltage divider in front of the analog input in order so that I can measure higher voltages, even though the Teensy 3.1 only supports voltages up to 3.3V.

For example, if I plugged my 50%-ish resistor divider on channel A0 into 3.3V, I would run the following command:

We now have 1.799 for the “voltage” seen at the pin with an attenuation factor of 1. If we divide 1.799 by 3.3 we get 0.545 for our attenuation value. Now we run the following to get our newly calibrated value:

This process highlights an issue with using standard resistors. Unless the resistors are precision resistors, the values will not ever really match up very well. I used 4 1meg resistors to make two voltage dividers. One of them had about a 46% division and the other was close to 48%. Sure, those seem close, but in this circuit I needed to be accurate to at least 50mV. The difference between 46% and 48% is enough to throw this off. So, when doing something like this with trying to derive an input voltage after using an imprecise voltage divider, some form of calibration is definitely needed.

Conclusion

Battery Charger with EZDAQ

Battery Charger with EZDAQ Attached (don’t mind the O-Scope probes…those are for another test)

After hooking everything up and getting everything to run, it was fairly simple for me to take some two-channel measurements:

This will dump the output of my program into the charge.csv file (which is measuring the charge cycle on the battery). I will get samples every 5 seconds. Later, I can use this data to make sure my circuit is working properly and observe its behavior over long periods of time. While crude, this quick and dirty DAQ solution works quite well for my purposes.

Dev boards? Where we’re going we won’t need dev boards…

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A complete tutorial for using an STM32 without a dev board

Introduction

STM32F103C8 Tray from eBay

STM32F103C8 Tray from eBay

About two years ago I started working with the Teensy 3.1 (which uses a Freescale Kinetis ARM-Cortex microcontroller) and I was super impressed with the ARM processor, both for its power and relative simplicity (it is not simple…its just relatively simple for the amount of power you get for the cost IMO). Almost all my projects before that point had consisted of AVRs and PICs (I’m in the AVR camp now), but now ARM-based microcontrollers had become serious contenders for something that I could go to instead. I soon began working on a small development board project also involving some Freescale Kinetis microcontrollers since those are what I have become the most familiar with. Sadly, I have had little success since I have been trying to make a programmer myself (the official one is a minimum of $200). During the course of this project I came across a LOT of STM32 stuff and it seemed that it was actually quite easy to set up. Lots of the projects used the STM32 Discovery and similar dev boards, which are a great tools and provide an easy introduction to ARM microcontrollers. However, my interest is more towards doing very bare metal development. Like soldering the chip to a board and hooking it up to a programmer. Who needs any of that dev board stuff? For some reason I just find doing embedded development without a development board absolutely fascinating. Some people might interpret doing things this way as a form of masochism. Perhaps I should start seeing a doctor…

Having seen how common the STM32 family was (both in dev boards and in commercial products) and noting that they were similarly priced to the Freescale Kinetis series, I looked in to exactly what I would need to program these, saw that the stuff was cheap, and bought it. After receiving my parts and soldering everything up, I plugged everything into my computer and had a program running on the STM32 in a matter of hours. Contrast that to a year spent trying to program a Kinetis KL26 with only partial success.

This post is a complete step-by-step tutorial on getting an STM32 microcontroller up and running without using a single dev board (breakout boards don’t count as dev boards for the purposes of this tutorial). I’m writing this because I could not find a standalone tutorial for doing this with an ARM microcontroller and I ended up having to piece it together bit by bit with a lot of googling. My objective is to walk you through the process of purchasing the appropriate parts, writing a small program, and uploading it to the microcontroller.

I make the following assumptions:

  • The reader is familiar with electronics and soldering.
  • The reader is familiar with flash-based microcontrollers in general (PIC, AVR, ARM, etc) and has programmed a few using a separate standalone programmer before.
  • The reader knows how to read a datasheet.
  • The reader knows C and is at least passingly familiar with the overall embedded build process of compilation-linking-flashing.
  • The reader knows about makefiles.
  • The reader is ridiculously excited about ARM microcontrollers and is strongly motivated to overlook any mistakes here and try this out for themselves (srsly tho…if you see a problem or have a suggestion, leave it in the comments. I really do appreciate feedback.)

All code, makefiles, and configuration stuff can be found in the project repository on github.

Project Repository: https://github.com/kcuzner/stm32f103c8-blink

Materials

You will require the following materials:

  • A computer running Linux. If you run Windows only, please don’t be dissuaded. I’m just lazy and don’t want to test this for Windows. It may require some finagling. Manufacturer support is actually better for Windows since they provide some interesting configuration and programming software that is Windows only…but who needs that stuff anyway?
  • A STLinkv2 Clone from eBay. Here’s one very similar to the one I bought. ~$3
  • Some STM32F103C8’s from eBay. Try going with the TQFP-48 package. Why this microcontroller? Because for some reason it is all over the place on eBay. I suspect that the lot I bought (and all of the ones on eBay) is probably not authentic from ST. I hear that Chinese STM32 clones abound nowadays. I got 10 for $12.80.
  • A breakout board for a TQFP-48 with 0.5mm pitch. Yes, you will need to solder surface mount. I found mine for $1. I’m sure you can find one for a similar price.
  • 4x 0.1uF capacitors for decoupling. Mine are surface mount in the 0603 package. These will be soldered creatively to the breakout board between the power pins to provide some decoupling since we will probably have wires flying all over. I had mine lying around in a parts bin, left over from my development board project. Digikey is great for getting these, but I’m sure you could find them on eBay or Amazon as well.
  • Some dupont wires for connecting the programmer to the STM32. You will need at least 4. These are the ones that are sold for Arduinos. These came with my programmer, but you may have some in your parts box. They are dang cheap on Amazon.
  • Regular wires.
  • An LED and a resistor.

I was able to acquire all of these parts for less than $20. Now, I did have stuff like the capacitors, led, resistor, and wires lying around in parts boxes, but those are quite cheap anyway.

Side note: Here is an excellent video by the EE guru Dave Jones on surface mount soldering if the prospect is less than palatable to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9FC9fAlfQE

Step 1: Download the datasheets

Above we decided to use the STM32F103C8 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller in a TQFP-48 package. This microcontroller has so many peripherals its no wonder its the one all over eBay. I could see this microcontroller easily satisfying the requirements for all of my projects. Among other things it has:

  • 64K flash, 20K RAM
  • 72MHz capability with an internal PLL
  • USB
  • CAN
  • I2C & SPI
  • Lots of timers
  • Lots of PWM
  • Lots of GPIO

All this for ~$1.20/part no less! Of course, its like $6 on digikey, but for my purposes having an eBay-sourced part is just fine.

Ok, so when messing with any microcontroller we need to look at its datasheet to know where to plug stuff in. For almost all ARM Microcontrollers there will be no less than 2 datasheet-like documents you will need: The part datasheet and the family reference manual. The datasheet contains information such as the specific pinouts and electrical characteristics and the family reference manual contains the detailed information on how the microcontroller works (core and peripherals). These are both extremely important and will be indispensable for doing anything at all with one of these microcontrollers bare metal.

Find the STM32F103C8 datasheet and family reference manual here (datasheet is at the top of the page, reference manual is at the bottom): http://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers/stm32f103c8.html. They are also found in the “ref” folder of the repository.

Step 2: Figure out where to solder and do it

STM32F103C8 Pins of interest

STM32F103C8 Pins of interest

After getting the datasheet we need to solder the microcontroller down to the breakout board so that we can start working with it on a standard breadboard. If you prefer to go build your own PCB and all that (I usually do actually) then do that instead of this. However, you will still need to know which pins to hook up.

On the pin diagram posted here you will find the highlighted pins of interest for hooking this thing up. We need the following pins at a minimum:

  • Shown in Red/Blue: All power pins, VDD, VSS, AVDD, and AVSS. There are four pairs: 3 for the VDD/VSS and one AVDD/AVSS. The AVDD/AVSS pair is specifically used to power the analog/mixed signal circuitry and is separate to give us the opportunity to perform some additional filtering on those lines and remove supply noise induced by all the switching going on inside the microcontroller; an opportunity I won’t take for now.
  • Shown in Yellow/Green: The SWD (Serial Wire Debug) pins. These are used to connect to the STLinkV2 programmer that you purchased earlier. These can be used for so much more than just programming (debugging complete with breakpoints, for a start), but for now we will just use it to talk to the flash on the microcontroller.
  • Shown in Cyan: Two fun GPIOs to blink our LEDs with. I chose PB0 and PB1. You could choose others if you would like, but just make sure that they are actually GPIOs and not something unexpected.

Below you will find a picture of my breakout board. I soldered a couple extra pins since I want to experiment with USB.

STM32F103C8 Breakout

STM32F103C8 Breakout

Very important: You may notice that I have some little tiny capacitors (0.1uF) soldered between the power pins (the one on the top is the most visible in the picture). You need to mount your capacitors between each pair of VDD/VSS pins (including AVDD/AVSS). How you do this is completely up to you, but it must be done and they should be rather close to the microcontroller itself. If you don’t it is entirely possible that when the microcontroller first turns on and powers up (specifically at the first falling edge of the internal clock cycle), the inductance created by the flying power wires we have will create a voltage spike that will either cause a malfunction or damage. I’ve broken microcontrollers by forgetting the decoupling caps and I’m not eager to do it again.

Step 3: Connect the breadboard and programmer

Cheap STLinkV2 Clone

Cheap STLinkV2 Clone

Don’t do this with the programmer plugged in.

On the right you will see my STLinkV2 clone which I will use for this project. Barely visible is the pinout. We will need the following pins connected from the programmer onto our breadboard. These come off the header on the non-USB end of the programmer. Pinouts may vary. Double check your programmer!

  • 3.3V: We will be using the programmer to actually power the microcontroller since that is the simplest option. I believe this pin is Pin 7 on my header.
  • GND: Obviously we need the ground. On mine this was Pin 4.
  • SWDIO: This is the data for the SWD bus. Mine has this at Pin 2.
  • SWCLK: This is the clock for the SWD bus. Mine has this at Pin 6.

You may notice in the above picture that I have an IDC cable coming off my programmer rather than the dupont wires. I borrowed the cable from my AVR USBASP programmer since it was more available at the time rather than finding the dupont cables that came with the STLinkV2.

Next, we need to connect the following pins on the breadboard:

  • STM32 [A]VSS pins 8, 23, 35, and 47 connected to ground.
  • STM32 [A]VDD pins 9, 24, 36, and 48 connected to 3.3V.
  • STM32 pin 34 to SWDIO.
  • STM32 pin 37 to SWCLK.
  • STM32 PB0 pin 18 to a resistor connected to the anode of an LED. The cathode of the LED goes to ground. Pin 19 (PB1) can also be connected in a similar fashion if you should so choose.

Here is my breadboard setup:

STM32F103C8 Breadboard Setup

STM32F103C8 Breadboard Setup

Step 4: Download the STM32F1xx C headers

Project Repository: https://github.com/kcuzner/stm32f103c8-blink

Since we are going to write a program, we need the headers. These are part of the STM32CubeF1 library found here.

Visit the page and download the STM32CubeF1 zip file. It will ask for an email address. If you really don’t want to give them your email address, the necessary headers can be found in the project github repository.

Alternately, just clone the repository. You’ll miss all the fun of poking around the zip file, but sometimes doing less work is better.

The STM32CubeF1 zip file contains several components which are designed to help people get started quickly when programming STM32s. This is one thing that ST definitely does better than Freescale. It was so difficult to find the headers for the Kinetis microcontrollers that almost gave up at that point. Anyway, inside the zip file we are only interested in the following:

  • The contents of Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32F1xx/Include. These headers contain the register definitions among other things which we will use in our program to reference the peripherals on the device.
  • Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32F1xx/Source/Templates/gcc/startup_stm32f103xb.s. This contains the assembly code used to initialize the microcontroller immediately after reset. We could easily write this ourselves, but why reinvent the wheel?
  • Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32F1xx/Source/Templates/system_stm32f1xx.c. This contains the common system startup routines referenced by the assembly file above.
  • Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32F1xx/Source/Templates/gcc/linker/STM32F103XB_FLASH.ld. This is the linker script for the next model up of the microcontroller we have (we just have to change the “128K” to a “64K” near the beginning of the file in the MEMORY section (line 43 in my file) and we are good to go). This is used to tell the linker where to put all the parts of the program inside the microcontroller’s flash and RAM. Mine had a “0” on every blank line. If you see this in yours, delete those “0”s. They will cause errors.
  • The contents of Drivers/CMSIS/Include. These are the core header files for the ARM Cortex-M3 and the definitions contained therein are used in all the other header files we reference.

I copied all the files referenced above to various places in my project structure so they could be compiled into the final program. Please visit the repository for the exact locations and such. My objective with this tutorial isn’t really to talk too much about project structure, and so I think that’s best left as an exercise for the reader.

Step 5: Install the required software

We need to be able to compile the program and flash the resulting binary file to the microcontroller. In order to do this, we will require the following programs to be installed:

  • The arm-none-eabi toolchain. I use arch linux and had to install “arm-none-eabi-gcc”. On Ubuntu this is called “gcc-arm-none-eabi”. This is the cross-compiler for the ARM Cortex cores. The naming “none-eabi” comes from the fact that it is designed to compile for an environment where the program is the only thing running on the target processor. There is no underlying operating system talking to the application binary file (ABI = application binary interface, none-eabi = No ABI) in order to load it into memory and execute it. This means that it is ok with outputting raw binary executable programs. Contrast this with Linux which likes to use the ELF format (which is a part of an ABI specification) and the OS will interpret that file format and load the program from it.
  • arm-none-eabi binutils. In Arch the package is “arm-none-eabi-binutils”. In Ubuntu this is “binutils-arm-none-eabi”. This contains some utilities such as “objdump” and “objcopy” which we use to convert the output ELF format into the raw binary format we will use for flashing the microcontroller.
  • Make. We will be using a makefile, so obviously you will need make installed.
  • OpenOCD. I’m using 0.9.0, which I believe is available for both Arch and Ubuntu. This is the program that we will use to talk to the STLinkV2 which in turn talks to the microcontroller. While we are just going to use it to flash the microcontroller, it can be also used for debugging a program on the processor using gdb.

Once you have installed all of the above programs, you should be good to go for ARM development. As for an editor or IDE, I use vim. You can use whatever. It doesn’t matter really.

Step 6: Write and compile the program

Ok, so we need to write a program for this microcontroller. We are going to simply toggle on and off a GPIO pin (PB0). After reset, the processor uses the internal RC oscillator as its system clock and so it runs at a reasonable 8MHz or so I believe. There are a few steps that we need to go through in order to actually write to the GPIO, however:

  1. Enable the clock to PORTB. Most ARM microcontrollers, the STM32 included, have a clock gating system that actually turns off the clock to pretty much all peripherals after system reset. This is a power saving measure as it allows parts of the microcontroller to remain dormant and not consume power until needed. So, we need to turn on the GPIO port before we can use it.
  2. Set PB0 to a push-pull output. This microcontroller has many different options for the pins including analog input, an open-drain output, a push-pull output, and an alternate function (usually the output of a peripheral such as a timer PWM). We don’t want to run our LED open drain for now (though we certainly could), so we choose the push-pull output. Most microcontrollers have push-pull as the default method for driving their outputs.
  3. Toggle the output state on. Once we get to this point, it’s success! We can control the GPIO by just flipping a bit in a register.
  4. Toggle the output state off. Just like the previous step.

Here is my super-simple main program that does all of the above:

If we turn to our trusty family reference manual, we will see that the clock gating functionality is located in the Reset and Clock Control (RCC) module (section 7 of the manual). The gates to the various peripherals are sorted by the exact data bus they are connected to and have appropriately named registers. The PORTB module is located on the APB2 bus, and so we use the RCC->APB2ENR to turn on the clock for port B (section 7.3.7 of the manual).

The GPIO block is documented in section 9. We first talk to the low control register (CRL) which controls pins 0-7 of the 16-pin port. There are 4 bits per pin which describe the configuration grouped in to two 2-bit (see how many “2” sounding words I had there?) sections: The Mode and Configuration. The Mode sets the analog/input/output state and the Configuration handles the specifics of the particular mode. We have chosen output (Mode is 0b11) and the 50MHZ-capable output mode (Cfg is 0b00). I’m not fully sure what the 50MHz refers to yet, so I just kept it at 50MHz because that was the default value.

After talking to the CRL, we get to talk to the BSRR register. This register allows us to write a “1” to a bit in the register in order to either set or reset the pin’s output value. We start by writing to the BS0 bit to set PB0 high and then writing to the BR0 bit to reset PB0 low. Pretty straightfoward.

It’s not a complicated program. Half the battle is knowing where all the pieces fit. The STM32F1Cube zip file contains some examples which could prove quite revealing into the specifics on using the various peripherals on the device. In fact, it includes an entire hardware abstraction layer (HAL) which you could compile into your program if you wanted to. However, I have heard some bad things about it from a software engineering perspective (apparently it’s badly written and quite ugly). I’m sure it works, though.

So, the next step is to compile the program. See the makefile in the repository. Basically what we are going to do is first compile the main source file, the assembly file we pulled in from the STM32Cube library, and the C file we pulled in from the STM32Cube library. We will then link them using the linker script from the STM32Cube and then dump the output into a binary file.

The result of this makefile is that it will create a file called “bin/blink.bin” which contains our compiled program. We can then flash this to our microcontroller using openocd.

Step 7: Flashing the program to the microcontroller

Source for this step: https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/Arduino_STM32/wiki/Programming-an-STM32F103XXX-with-a-generic-%22ST-Link-V2%22-programmer-from-Linux

This is the very last step. We get to do some openocd configuration. Firstly, we need to write a small configuration script that will tell openocd how to flash our program. Here it is:

Firstly, we init and halt the processor (reset halt). When the processor is first powered up, it is going to be running whatever program was previously flashed onto the microcontroller. We want to stop this execution before we overwrite the flash. Next we execute “flash write_image erase” which will first erase the flash memory (if needed) and then write our program to it. After writing the program, we then tell the processor to execute the program we just flashed (reset run) and we shutdown openocd.

Now, openocd requires knowledge of a few things. It first needs to know what programmer to use. Next, it needs to know what device is attached to the programmer. Both of these requirements must be satisfied before we can run our script above. We know that we have an stlinkv2 for a programmer and an stm32f1xx attached on the other end. It turns out that openocd actually comes with configuration files for these. On my installation these are located at “/usr/share/openocd/scripts/interface/stlink-v2.cfg” and “/usr/share/openocd/scripts/target/stm32f1x.cfg”, respectively. We can execute all three files (stlink, stm32f1, and our flashing routine (which I have named “openocd.cfg”)) with openocd as follows:

So, small sidenote: If we left off the “shutdown” command, openocd would actually continue running in “daemon” mode, listening for connections to it. If you wanted to use gdb to interact with the program running on the microcontroller, that is what you would use to do it. You would tell gdb that there is a “remote target” at port 3333 (or something like that). Openocd will be listening at that port and so when gdb starts talking to it and trying to issue debug commands, openocd will translate those through the STLinkV2 and send back the translated responses from the microcontroller. Isn’t that sick?

In the makefile earlier, I actually made this the “install” target, so running “sudo make install” will actually flash the microcontroller. Here is my output from that command for your reference:

After doing that I saw the following awesomeness:

STM32F103C8 with LED turned on

STM32F103C8 with LED turned on

Wooo!!! The LED blinks! At this point, you have successfully flashed an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with little more than a cheap programmer from eBay, a breakout board, and a few stray wires. Feel happy about yourself.

Conclusion

For me, this marks the end of one journey and the beginning of another. I can now feel free to experiment with ARM microcontrollers without having to worry about ruining a nice shiny development board. I can buy a obscenely powerful $1 STM32 microcontroller from eBay and put it into any project I want. If I were to try to do that with AVRs, I would be stuck with the ultra-low-end 8-pin ATTiny13A since that’s about it for ~$1 AVR eBay offerings (don’t worry…I’ve got plenty of ATMega328PB’s…though they weren’t $1). I sincerely hope that you found this tutorial useful and that it might serve as a springboard for doing your own dev board-free ARM development.

If you have any questions or comments (or want to let me know about any errors I may have made), let me know in the comments section here. I will try my best to help you out, although I can’t always find the time to address every issue.