I have created several small projects to demonstrate HW and SW concepts in a break-out board setup with a STM32 “Blue Pill” board.

The PlatformIO extension within the VSCode IDE using the Arduino environment was used to develop all test and demo programs.

For programming the “Blue Pill” board the low-cost ST-Link V2 programming dongle was attached to the dedicated connector on the opposite side of the USB port and for serial communication with the Arduino Serial Monitor of the IDE a USB/Serial dongle was connected to the serial port of the “Blue Pill”, see the picture below.

The following small projects have been created to test HW and SW:

  • Project1: Usage of the module with the USB/Serial (FTDI) adapter together with the PlatformIO IDE in VSCode on Ubuntu 20.04.
  • Project2: Usage of a 16×4 character LCD with I2C adapter.
  • Project3: Usage of rotary encoders connected to the board supported by hardware interrupts.
  • Project4: Usage of the on-chip ADC with different resolutions.
  • Project5: Usage of PWM.
  • Project6: Usage of flash data storage and retrieval (to emulate EEPROM storage and retrieval).
  • Project7: Usage of FreeRTOS (C-Variant)
  • Project8: Usage of FreeRTOS (C++-Wrapper)

All the small projects are described in detail in a document here. The software can be found on my GitHub page here.