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Ada on a $2 eBay 'Bluepill' board (STM32F103C8T6)


For about $2 a 'bluepill' board can be obtained from eBay. Taking its name from the PCB patina this small board is used in the Arduino community. The SoC itself per ST's early docs on it was 64k flash and 20k data, that said, all STM32F103C8's you buy nowadays are 128k flash. The CPU is a Cortex-M3 which can be run at 72Mhz maximum. There is a good website that shows the schematic and pinout of the bluepill:

http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill



If you are an Arduino programmer, the link above will take you where you want to go. But suppose you wanted to try programming and using the bluepill a different way? Well that is what this blog entry is about. An Ada port was done via AdaCores Ada_Drivers_Library and the Libre GNAT toolchain to the bluepill. This is preliminary work but it is able to generate working code that the author already is using as of yesterday (a garage parking measurement sensor). 

The port of the library is derivative, starting from the STM32F4 series, the STM32F1 is a 10yr old design and as such, the F4 is an extension of the the F1. The F1 has some idiosyncrasies that seem to have been addressed in the F4 (eg: GPIO setup). The port fixes the SoC freq at 72Mhz. No low power work has been done yet but I assume in a WFI setting with peripherals not enabled, it should draw not too much current even with a 72Mhz functional speed. The embedded runtimes library has 2 flavours of runtime, a full and a small footprint (sfp). With only 20k of ram, even sfp is too dear for a bluepill so a new runtime that is very close to sfp was created, called ssfp (super small footprint). This runtime strips down the stack sizes to minimums, hopefully this won't bother users too much.

There are two libraries and a development folder that are needed for development and they are on github:



Development folder:


That folder has a structure of:

F
  F103
  F722
L
  L432
  L476
  L496

Each family is a subfolder.

The development folder has F103 projects such as:

adcdma_f103 ADC using DMA
adcgpio_f103 polled ADC on GPIO
bno_f103 test of I2C to a component
crc_f103 port of AdaCore's crc test to the bluepill
lsm9ds1_f103 my preliminary 9dof sensor start. I don't plan on using it with a bluepill.
spi_f103 Interfacing SPI to an Atmel 25640 (a 64k byte EEprom).
timer_f103 Timer interrupt
try_f103 my first test prob a good start for project0
vl53l0x_f103 My garage distance project.


For debug I use openocd-0.10 and a donor Stlink v2-1 from any discovery or nucleo board.
Just the other day I got a $2 Stlink v2 usb stick from China. For that one its a 4 wire attachment:

bluepillF103.cfg: (v2 shown, invert the comments for v2-1)


#source [find interface/stlink-v2-1.cfg]
source [find interface/stlink-v2.cfg]
transport select hla_swd
source [find target/stm32f1x.cfg]
reset_config srst_nogate




Bluepill running the try_f103 program connected to the STlinkv2. This is using the Raspberry Pi3 as a Wifi openocd server as is documented on this blog.

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