Connecting to STEVAL-ESC001V1

[CSzat]

Exactly how does one connect the "Motor Profiler" to an out-of-the-box STEVAL-ESC001V1?

I read all of the available documentation to no avail. Is the STLink USB hardware device required and does it need to be connected to the J4 "SWD" port?

One section of the documentation [UM2197] "implies" that a 3.3V USB-to_TTL serial connection to the J2 "UART" connector would work:

UART/I²C port (J2): normally used for serial communication between the ESC board and a PC; ST MC Workbench can be connected with the STM32, adding an external circuit (requires USB/RS232 converter-3v3 level)

.... but when the Motor Profiler is connected in this manner, I always receive a "No STLink Detected" error from the ST-Link CLI v2.4.0 from the Motor Profiler software.

Thanks for your help,

[CSzat]

• Can someone from ST or the community at large please help with such a basic device connection/programming question?

The documentation for the ST evaluation boards is so severely lacking its intended target function (allowing an engineer to immediately become familiar with a product functionality) that it amazes me.

Where are your "technical writers" coordinating with the product engineers to thoroughly explain and show, by example, exactly how one gets this thing going? Why would ST not give these eval boards to a Computer Science or Electrical Engineer college student and ask them to get it going from the "available product support documentation"?

The improvement to your product documentation's quality would amaze your audience/potential volume customers.

[CSzat]

• Can someone from ST or the community at large please help with such a basic device connection/programming question?

The documentation for the ST evaluation boards is so severely lacking its intended target function (allowing an engineer to immediately become familiar with a product functionality) that it amazes me.

Where are your "technical writers" coordinating with the product engineers to thoroughly explain and show, by example, exactly how one gets this thing going? Why would ST not give these eval boards to a Computer Science or Electrical Engineer college student and ask them to get it going from the "available product support documentation"?

The improvement to your product documentation's quality would amaze your audience/potential volume customers.

[CSzat]

Great support ST Electronics!!!!

Let the outright ignorance by the ST support staff of this this extremely starightforward and simple question be an example of how poorly supported any ST Electronics "evaluation boards" are.

As usual, I was forced to figure it out by myself, as in several previous similar situations.

ST Electronics needs a real tech-support infrastructure.

As "eval" boards are clearly at the beginning of any marketing campaign for influencing the design community to incorporate a company's silicon offerings into a 3rd party solution, I can confirm that ST has missed the boat on supporting their tech-based silicon product offerings.

For those wishing to know, the ST "Motor Profiler" requires a simultaneous electrical serial connection both with a USB connected STLink v2/v3 debug device (to push the Profiler hex code to the ARM) AS WELL AS a standard "UART" connection using a 3.3 VDC USB to Serial converter (to receive the resultant parameters and Motor-profiler status) .

Thanks to ST for making me figure it all out myself.

Competition is a great thing and you definitely have competition in the BLDC driver arena.

It really is too bad for you because your products clearly have great potential, yet, in my narrow opinion, you lose at the "product support" stages.

[KGree]

I am having trouble getting the UART connection working. Was there any trick to that part? I am using the TTL-232R-3V3- WE cable and believe that I have all of the wires connected correctly. Did you just connect the ground, TXD, and RXD? Did you connect the CTS to ground? Did you connect the Vcc from the cable?

Thanks in advance,

Kevin

[cedric H]

Hello,

Personally, I connect only TX, RX and GND. CTS is let unconnected. We do not use flow control in the lib.

Check that the baudrate is set to 115200.

Let me know if it works.

Regards

Cedric

[DCyr]

"For those wishing to know, the ST "Motor Profiler" requires a simultaneous electrical serial connection both with a USB connected STLink v2/v3 debug device (to push the Profiler hex code to the ARM) AS WELL AS a standard "UART" connection using a 3.3 VDC USB to Serial converter (to receive the resultant parameters and Motor-profiler status) ."

If we succeed in making the serial connection electrically, we still have no idea what the commands and the data look like. Digging through the code to discover what this looks like is very difficult. Is this serial communication documented somewhere? Thanks!

[CSzat]

If you want to "reverse engineer" the protocol (which I would think ST would have completely documented to be available to assist those wishing to design-in ST's products), you could simply parallel tie the RS-232 TX-to RX and RX-to-TX on another "serial port" and use a terminal emulation program such as "PuTTY" to log both the Tx and Rx data streams.

[MMcMa.1]

It is sad that when I search for an answer to the very same question there are still no valid answers. The question about UART was answered here and I can connect to the STEVAL-ESC001V1 board at 115200 baud via Motor Control Workbench.... but I still cannot connect via ST-Link. I am not a dummy, but I don't know what I don't know. So how am I supposed to connect to this device via ST-Link so the ST Motor Profiler works? See my question on Electrical Engineering (StackExchange) https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/551482/st-motor-profiler-and-steval-esc001v1-st-link-connection-error

It would be nice if ST would consolidate information regarding this in one document, and provide a cookbook solution so dummies like me can get going with their product easily (and stop banging my head against the wall).

[fpaga.1]

Hi!

Have you found the solution? I have the same problem.

[cedric H]

Hello @fpaga.1​ ,

What is your problem exactly ?

I just checked the user manual of the board available here.

Page 10 you have a clear description of how to connect the STLink.

If you do not have a standalone STLink, you can always use one of any Nucleo board and connect the required wires (SWDIO and SWCLK) Be sure that your MCU is powered (MCU VDD & GND ). The connection of the SLink from a Nucleo require the removal of two jumpers to not flash the MCU of the Nucleo itself.

Regarding the UART, it is described page 7.

To run the profiler, you need the both connections, The STLink to be able to flash the profiler binary, and the UART to allow the profiler tool to command the motor and read the profiled values.

Let me know if there are still fuzzy area.

Regards

Cedric

[Laurent Ca...]

The question has been moved from the section "Motor Control Hardware" to the "STM32 Motor Control" section (the question is about the STM32 MC SDK). 

Best regards

[DCyr]

We were able to communicate with the 1V1, plus 3 other ST evaluation boards, to drive the motor with varying degrees of success, however, there was no documentation about the communication protocol between the ST GUI and the eval boards. So, you can spin your motor with the GUI, but they won't divulge the GUI code and without the commands to drive the eval boards, it was impossible to drive the motor from a user program. Given ST refused to release the information, our "soultion" was to drop ST products altogether!

[cpelayoah]

I'm having the same problem. I'm trying to connect the ESC (which is also connected with the flight controller) with my PC through the 3v TTL-USB converter and also connecting the SWD port to its corresponding STLINK V2 pins. What can I do in order to make the motor spin? Regarding the pwm generation with the flight controller I'm able to generate my desired pwm signal but I'm having problems with the ESC firmware with the motor control workbench . How do you generated the proper firmware for the ESC in order to set the maximum and minimum pwm values?