About

This site was created so that viewers building projects with STM32 technology could find information and support in one place. A site that would cater to it’s community of viewers/subscribers, sort of like a Social Media Group, but hopefully better. In the beginning the plan is to start by creating a handful of tutorials and get feedback from the viewers, then take the feedback build upon the comments/suggestions.

Viewers are invited to provide comments and suggestions, such that we can all learn from them. Maybe there is typo mistake or things could have done different or better. Whatever the case, hearing from the viewers can only makes this site better.

There are plenty of other blogs or sites where the viewers asked questions, but their questions never get answered. It’s pretty much a dead site in my mind, and that is far from what this site is intending to be.

This site will not just be dedicated to STM32 technology. There are plans to discuss other topics such as using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers for trouble shooting. Topics also might include how to better trap for error conditions, or how to handle errors once your project leaves the design phase and it’s being used maybe in pre-production. Covering other advanced topics such as networking, DNS resolution, connecting to an external SNTP server to set your local RTC, remote logging, etc.

These blogs/tutorials assume you have working knowledge of STM32CubeIDE. If you do not have prior working knowledge using STM32CubeIDE, then you should probably click on this link first, as I don’t currently have a tutorial for that topic: STM32CubeIDE Tutorial If you are using a different IDE for your development, then I can’t vouch for how useful these tutorials will be for you.

With hopes you find this site useful, please subscribe.

Unfortunately, I’ve experienced so many sites that provide a resource for teaching up to a certain point! That might be great for some people, but they actually don’t go the extra step in showing what else you need to apply this technology to be beneficial or practical in a real world situation. Yes, it’s great that I can write data to this memory chip, but oh hey!….. You can only use this example to write less than 10 bytes before it craps out on you. Why!?!?! Well, because the tutorial didn’t bother to explain to you that the chip had some limitation, and you needed extra coding/wiring to make it really useful!!!! WHAT!!!!????!!!!!

I’ve been a software engineer since 1980, and I’m still intrigued by new ways to apply my many years of working with computers to new projects. At first I started building an 8085 Single Board Computer. I bread boarded up a 8085A CPU, with 32KB EEPROM and a 32KB SRAM. I also introduced an Intel 8251 USART into the mix which allowed me to connect an FTDI to a dumb terminal emulator on my PC via USB.

Once I got this up and running I started to play around with writing my own multi-tasking routines to handle multiple tasks. After a while I decided that maybe I should focus on current technology instead of chip technology that was 45+ years old. Also, there isn’t a lot of support or documentation on 45+ year old tech.

I’ve played around with Arduino products before in the past and never really felt it was the right platform for me. I decided to pivot and wound up teaching myself ways to utilize STM32 MPU’s instead. Programming STM32 products seems more realistic like you are using true C/C++, which I’ve used in my past professional career, not with a lot of hidden auto magic code.

Using STM32CubeIDE, which is based off of Eclipse, felt like home. I’ve used Eclipse with Java since the mid 2000’s and I felt comfortable using it. Also, I wasn’t able to set breakpoints and step through code with the Arduino products like I can with STM32 products. I found that trying to debug Arduino code using the Serial Monitor was a hack in my opinion, and this was a big factor in switching to STM32 MPU’s.