GCC for STM32F429

About a year ago I bought a Discover kit from ST. This one has an STM32F429, which is an ARM M4 running at 168MHz with 256KB of RAM and 2MB of Flash. This seemed like the beefiest microcontroller I would need for a long time. It also has a 2.4" LCD and an external 64 Mbit SDRAM. At only $24 it seemed like a really good deal.

Last year when I had some free time, I tried to get a blinky program running for the board without much luck. The example I found had a makefile but I could not get make to work with it. For one, it could not find the rm utility to delete files. Since then I have found out that utilities like these can be installed on Windows also.

Next, I tried getting GCC working with Eclipse. For all other microcontrollers I use Code::Blocks, but the tutorials I found used Eclipse. One tutorial had no less than 25 steps to get it working, which is absolutely ridiculous if all you want to do is blink an LED. Good for the author of the blog for being so extensive but I wish ST offered an easy way to get GCC working just to get started. Another option many websites pointed to was Sourcery CodeBench. There is a free version for five different processors but the ARM version is no longer free. Next, I tried OpenSTM32. This is the Eclipse IDE prepackaged with GCC and everything needed to compile. It installed fine but when I tried to update it, the installation failed. Using the old version, I tried to generate a new project using the Standard Peripheral firmware, which for some reason is not included in OpenSTM32. The download for that also failed. Next up was Keil. It seems to work well but I do not like being limited to only 32KB of firmware. App note 230 from Keil shows how to get it working with the STM32F4 Discovery board, which is similar to the board I have. The app note shows how to use the Pack Installer in version 5.10 of the MDK software to download a blinky program or another blinky program based on an RTOS with threads. Unfortunately, the blinky program the entire app note is based on is completely missing from the packages in version 5.14 of MDK. There doesn't seem to be any way to install a simple example without the added complications of an RTOS, which is certainly overkill for blinking LEDs.

What I settled on in the end was a set of GNU ARM Eclipse Plug-ins. There is only one thing to install in Eclipse and the plug-ins generate everything from a wizard. The included blinky program is set to work with the STM32F4 Discovery board, but it compiled and ran fine after I changed the LED pin defines. To upload I used ST-LINK, which is also quirky in that it does not actually use the file you select in the Program window. Instead it uses the last file that was "loaded," so if you select a file then recompile, it will not actually use the new version. This is annoying and took a while to figure out. After I was sure I had things working right, I set Eclipse to upload with ST-LINK automatically after each compile.

To test the new setup, I ran the BCD multiply test from the microcontroller comparison. Since I'm on vacation and don't have all my other stuff, I timed it with a stopwatch and got about 24 seconds. This is five times faster than the LPC1114, which is pretty good. Next, I would like to design an improved version of the 6502 Virtual Trainer with this chip.