blue-pill-quickstart

Quickstart a Rust project for the blue pill board, or any STM32F103xx board.

Quickstart a new project

This section suppose your computer is already ready to hack on a blue pill.

Get and cleanup:

git clone https://github.com/TeXitoi/blue-pill-quickstart.git my-new-project
cd my-new-project
rm -fr .git LICENSE README.md st-link-v2-blue-pill.jpg
git init

Edit Cargo.toml for author and project name, and you're ready to go.

Setting up everything on your machine

First, you need hardware. Buy a blue pill and a ST-Link V2. You also need a computer, I will suppose you have a Debian based distribution. It should be easy to adapt the instructions to any supported computer (Linux, MacOSX, Windows).

Then, install and setup everything on your computer:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
rustup target add thumbv7m-none-eabi
sudo apt-get install gdb-arm-none-eabi openocd

If you don't have gdb-arm-none-eabi, you can try gdb-multiarch (on Ubuntu 18.04 for example) or gdb. In these cases, you'll have to update .cargo/config accordingly.

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/TeXitoi/blue-pill-quickstart.git
cd blue-pill-quickstart

Now, connect your ST-Link to your blue pill. Connect the ST-Link to your computer.

Launch openocd:

./openocd.sh

Open a new terminal, compile and flash

cd blue-pill-quickstart
cargo run

Now, the program is flashed, and you are on a gdb prompt. Type c (for continue) you can see the on board LED blinking.

Trouble Shooting

Wrong connection of the ST-Link

The formerly mentionned ST-Link may not have the right pin mapping as showed on its shell. If openocd returns unknown code 0x9, please check the pin mapping by removing the shell and re-connect your ST-Link with the mapping shown on the PCB.

If you're unable to remove the shell, try this pin mapping:

pin		pin
1	RST	2	SWCLK
3	SWIM	4	SWDIO
5	GND	6	GND
7	3.3V	8	3.3V
9	5.0V	10	5.0V

Flash protected

When flashing your blue pill for the first time, flashing may fail with the following messages in the openocd console:

Error: stm32x device protected
Error: failed erasing sectors 0 to 23
Error: flash_erase returned -4

This means your blue pill's flash is protected. To unlock it, you can connect to your openocd session with:

telnet localhost 4444

and type the following commands:

reset halt
stm32f1x unlock 0
reset halt

Sources

This quickstart is inspired by the cortex-m-quickstart and Discovery. I recommand reading them.