Choose a ST board suitable for my needs in order to ship to the market

[vernture]

I have a Nucleo-64 STM32F411RE. It's cool. I can program it, debug code and everything nice. But it's too large, however! I need to pack my projects to be as small as possible in order to ship to the market. 

I need an official stm32 board with an included St-Link and features like nearly what a Blue Pill board offers, for now.

At first I thought of NUCLEO-F042K6. Good price (10.8 USD), good size, ST-Link included, but its features may not be enough. 

What do you suggest?

[mƎALLEm]

Hello,

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@vernture wrote:

however! I need to pack my projects to be as small as possible in order to ship to the market. 

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According to this document: EVALUATION BOARD TERMS OF USE 

"The Evaluation Board shall not be, in any case, directly or indirectly assembled as a part in any production of Yours as it is solely developed to serve evaluation and testing purposes and has no direct function and is not a finished product."

So ST boards are used for evaluation and testing purposes only.

[vernture]

1- How is a product's output reliable for evaluation and tests when it's not finished?

2- Where to purchase finished STM32 boards?

 

[mƎALLEm]

1- Tested for evaluation not for final user application. Each application has its own environment, qualification, temperature.. etc.. that ST doesn't in any case be responsible of it.

2- If you mean by "finished STM32 boards" boards to be used in a final project, unfortunately there is no such boards. ST is not boards provider but a silicon provider. The boards provided are available to evaluate its products not for other purposes.

[mfgkw]

In addition to mƎALLEm's note it is hard to suggest anything.

What are your needs? What is wrong with NUCLEO-F042K6? CPU power? Flash? RAM? Peripherals?

There are many NUCLEO-32 boards. NUCLEO-G431KB or NUCLEO-L432KC have more of all.

[TDK]

Just wanted to say that this is standard across manufacturers, not ST specific. Here is TI's clause. It even has the same weird "not finished product" wording.

 

Adafruit sells a few small STM32 boards, here's one:

adafruit/Adafruit-Feather-STM32F405-Express-PCB: PCB files for the Adafruit Adafruit Feather STM32F405 Express

[Andrew Neil]

As has been explained, ST boards are just for evaluation/development - not for shipping in final products.

This is common throughout the industry.

 

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@vernture wrote:

I need ... board with an included St-Link

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Why ?

An ST-Link is a development tool - you wouldn't normally include such a thing in a finished product.

 

The normal process for developing a product is that you may use development/evaluation boards in the early stages as you start to get things working, but the final product would be your own custom hardware design.

If you don't have the capacity to do hardware design and manufacturing, then there are plenty of companies (and individuals) who will do that for you. For a fee, of course...

[vernture]

Yeah, right. The st-link part should not be included nor should it shipped with the final product.

I need to start learning how to make/design custom boards.

[xisco]

Hello,

 

If you can't design your own board, there are several boards you can find from various online vendors. Since many of them has a fake microcontroller installed, to ensure good reliability, you'd need to replace it with a genuine one, purchased from a trusted dealer.

 

You'd also need to ensure that the board design you choose is compatible with the datasheet of the installed microcontroller.

 

For example, the Blue Pill you mentioned usually has a fake microcontroller, and it also has a LED connected to the PC13 GPIO, which, according to the microcontroller datasheet, cannot be done.

 

You can use the ST-LINK of your NUCLEO board to program it, if your board has a genuine STM32 chip installed.

 

Regards.

[Andrew Neil]

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@xisco wrote:

Since many of them has a fake microcontroller installed, to ensure good reliability, you'd need to replace it with a genuine one

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Not sure that's really going to be viable in production?

A bigger problem with "Blue Pill" is that you really have no guarantee of what's actually going to be on it - there is no continuity of supply.

 

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@xisco wrote:

a LED connected to the PC13 GPIO, which, according to the microcontroller datasheet, cannot be done..

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It' sourcing current which is the problem (due to the power switch); I think the Blue Pill only sinks the LED current - so that's OK:

https://community.st.com/t5/stm32-mcus-products/stm32f030-pc13-14-15-current-sink-limits/m-p/721081/highlight/true#M261048

 

Here's one "Blue Pill" schematic:

https://stm32-base.org/assets/pdf/boards/original-schematic-STM32F103C8T6-Blue_Pill.pdf

But, again, no guarantees that any particular product sold as "Blue Pill" will actually conform to that. 

[xisco]

Sorry,

I forgot it was for production. Obviously change chips is not a good solution.

 

Regards

[mfgkw]

Maybe it's time to learn how to design a custom board. Something like a bluepill is not really hard to create, e.g. with KiCAD. Several PCB services can produce them for you once you have a design.

Another idea: many boards like blue pill or even better black pill have their design available for free. Take one of them and give it to a PCB service to produce some dozens or some hundreds. You get a blue pill or black pill with a genuine STM soldered on it.

[Grant Bt]

I think Adafruit sells a Black Pill F411 board. Hopefully made by them, but you may want to verify that.

Consider also Olimex and Waveshare. We've had good luck with them.