Advice on choosing a board

1

Hi,

I’m about to embark on a project built around anSTM32F44 which I think is part of the nucleo F446ZE. It’s an initial exploration to try a multi tasking RTOS, which I have an application for, if I can get it to work. Picking a board is not easy as there are so many, but I’ve kind of settled on this board from a functions perspective, although I would say there are probably many others…

My questions are:
1 when I create a new project in PIO and pick a board, it has two - the 446 RC and the 446RE Can I pick one of these and expect things to work with the ZE ? I’m new to 32 bit stuff and don’t know the meaning of the suffixes.
2 Will I be able to debug and if so are key features such as breakpoints, step in /over, watches etc available?

thanks for help,
Paul

2

You can choose the board nucleo_f446ze according to the docs. That’s the exact board you have.

You can use the command line tools to search:

pio init -b pio boards f446ze

This results in:

Platform: ststm32
================================================================================
ID             MCU            Frequency    Flash    RAM    Name
-------------  -------------  -----------  -------  -----  ----------------
nucleo_f446ze  STM32F446ZET6  180MHz       512KB    128KB  ST Nucleo F446ZE

HTH

Cheers,
Norm.

3

thanks Norm, for some reason when I tried in the gui the board didn’t appear. It does now, probably me.

wrt debugging, in the PIO.ini I found this link to help
https://docs.platformio.org/page/projectconf.html

and when I explored it, there is a debug section:

; Debug options
debug_tool = custom
debug_server =
    JLinkGDBServer
    -singlerun
    -if
    SWD
    -select
    USB
    -port
    2331
    -device
    STM32F103C8

so if I change the device to STM32F446ZE, will that provide debugging facilities?

thanks
Paul

4

On the page linked in my first reply you get all the details of setting up for your board. This link will take you to the debugging section.

I’m more of an AVR “specialist” I’m afraid.

HTH

Cheers,
Norm.