unix tools and firmware package for the STM32VL Discovery

To complement command line tools chain from Code Soucery, I download the command line toolset of unxutils. unxutils gives you similar Unix tools but develop for native execution. So the rm or the ls or the mv tool does not rely on cygwin.dll.

To kick off the development, I download the STM32VL Discovery Firmware package. This package contains some examples which I have used to quickly verify if my setup is correct or totally wrong. The source code of the firmware that is shipped with the STM32 discovery board is also part of the firmware package. The firmware package has accompanying documentation with it. Look for application note AN3268 on www.st.com.

You may also want to consider downloading ST-Link utility. This will allow you to download the binary into your discovery.

setting up the development for the STM32VL Discovery board

I found myself with some spare time so I go started on setting up a dev environment on the STM32VL Discovery board that I got recently. This post talks about the compilers.

Compiler

There are three options recommended by ST as a compiler. These are IAR Workbench, Atollic True Studio and Keil MDK-ARM. These tools are pretty restricted in some way, except for the Atollic command line tools. The restriction usually comes in the forms such as code size limitation.

Now the STM32 is just a ARM Cortex M3 core device, so there are many other ARM compilers available. The GNU toolchain also support the ARM core. This is the compiler that I choose as it is not limited in anyway.

The simplest way to to grab the lite version from Code Soucery. This will provide you with the full GNU toolchain including the binutils as well. However, as it stands, it is only driven from the command line.