Getting started with the STM32F7 Discovery board

The other week I got a brand new STM32F7 Discovery board, the fabled Cortex M7 had arrived and performance bliss was at hand ...

... except there were a few minor stumbling stones on the road to paradise ...

this is not an ad for ST, I did pay the full Mouser price.

• ST programming tools for the ST-Link interface are not available for Mac OSX, and the board does not expose the JTAG/SWD of the Cortex M7, it is only available through the onboard ST-Link adapter chip. The GGC ARM Embedded toolchain https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/+download was happy to generate code after importing some system defines and startup code from STM32Cube_FW_F7_V1.1.0 library and a bit of tweaking to Makefiles and linker scripts. It was possible to flash the binaries to the board using the USB file system interface, but then there is no debug connection, and it refused load code that was linked to use fast ITCM flash access.

• With some some work it was possible to add the chip and flash configuration details to the free stlink utility https://github.com/texane/stlink and also tweak the stlink RAM based flash writing code to handle the 64 bit flash access so flash is correctly written, all running on Mac OSX.

• The example code in the STM32Cube_FW_F7_V1.1.0 library does not by default use the external 25MHz crystal clock, only the onchip internal 16MHz oscillator. The PLL is also not configured by default, meaning the chip runs at 16MHz, and not the 196 or 216 Mhz that should be possible.

• For optimal performance the linker settings should be configured to make the code use the ART accelerated ITCM flash access at 0x0020000 instead of the normal, slow, flash access at 0x0800000. When the linker was configured this way the ST onboard USB flash loader refused to load code into flash, but stlink utility worked.

• The external SDRAM for the Discovery board has a different configuration than the one in the "system_stm32f7xx.c" supplied from ST. It seems ST has used the settings for another STM32F7 board and not been careful to make the changes for the F7 Discovery board.

Virtual USB com port was quite easy, it turns out that the USB subsystem is almsot identical to the the one on STMF4 chips.

After these tweaks I was able to run some simple tests where the chip executed between 200 and 300M instructions/sec. I think this can be a great chip for audio synthesis.

Next will be the big LCD display, but that must wait for when I have lots of free time again.

More USB and MIDI

Time goes fast, new and more powerful microprocessors are introduced, and the favourites of a year ago are fading and starts to collect dust in a draver filled with useful but not quite exciting boards. These days the Cortex M3 of the Maple board feels a bit old, the Teensy 3.1 is a great board and the Arduino type libraries and support is superb, but it has a bit limited memory and no hardware floating point.The boards I use mostly for audio generation at the moment are the Netduino plus 2, without the Netduino bootloader and .Net libraries, the STM32F4 Discovery and the XMC4500 Relax Kit Lite. All of these have Cortex-M4F processors, more than 128KB RAM and  1024KB of flash, they are all cheap and good value for money.

I need stable USB MIDI and after wrangling with the device libraries and development platforms, endless hierachies of folders and files that are usually targeted at Windows and often lacking USB MIDI, I decided to write yet another lightweight USB implementation. I know this might sound stupid and a waste of effort but having some time free due to vacation times and a bit of rainy summer I went ahead.

The code is written from scratch and uses only some MCU specific header files borrowed unchanged  from the manufaturer supplied code libraries. When time allows and I have done some more testing a few minimal example programs will be added.

I have uploaded the code to my Cortal Dendrites repository on Github:

https://github.com/mlu/cortal_dendrites/tree/master/cortex_m/usblib

Happy Coding :)