Electronics Adventures

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the 8-bit microcontrollers were ruling the hobbyist embedded world. But today, the 32-bit ARM Cortex Microcontrollers are so inexpensive and power efficient that there is no good reason to ignore them. Here, let us see how to program a STM32 ARM cortex Microcontroller in Linux environment. The specific microcontroller used here is an STM32F103C8 (ARM cortex M3) programmed in Arch linux. Components Generic STM32F103 board (blue pill) STLINK-V2 (STM32 programmer) Female-Female connectors All the above components can be bought from ebay for less than $10 total. The STLINK-V2 is optional since you can use any of USB-SERIAL converters like FT232, CP2102, PL2303, CH340 and the built-in UART bootloader of STM32 chip to program. So if you already have any of the above serial converters, you don't really need STLINK to program the STM32F103 microcontroller. But STLINK helps if you plan to use in circuit debugging functionalities. Software The

WiFi modules for projects were out of reach for lot of budget hobbyists like me for many years. But things changed when the Esp8266 module from Espressif Systems was released in 2014. Maker community went crazy over this module for the price tag (around $2 for the basic module) and within few months, toolchains, arduino libraries and so many development boards based on Esp8266 started popping up. Esp8266 is a low cost WiFi SoC manufactured by Espressif Systems. It is a 32-bit Tensilica microcontroller with 160KB RAM, support upto external 16MB flash and tons of peripherals like Timer, PWM, UART, I2C, SPI, ADC and so on. Given the cost of the module, the maker in me couldn't resist buying at least 4 different Esp8266 modules to experiment with. The community support for Esp8266 was simply superb though I had some troubles with setting the module in boot mode.  The opportunity to use Esp8266 in a major project came in the form of course project for "Real Time Embedded