Meet your hardware

Let’s get familiar with the hardware we’ll be working with.

STM32F3DISCOVERY (the “F3”)

Meet your hardware - 图1

We’ll refer to this board as “F3” throughout this book.

What does this board contain?

  • A STM32F303VCT6 microcontroller. This microcontroller has

    • A single core ARM Cortex-M4F processor with hardware support for single precision floating pointoperations and a maximum clock frequency of 72 MHz.

    • 256 KiB of “Flash” memory. (1 KiB = 1024 bytes)

    • 48 KiB of RAM.

    • many “peripherals”: timers, GPIO, I2C, SPI, USART, etc.

    • lots of “pins” that are exposed in the two lateral “headers”.

    • IMPORTANT This microcontroller operates at (around) 3.3V.

  • An accelerometer and a magnetometer (in a single package).

  • 8 user LEDs arranged in the shape of a compass

  • A second microcontroller: a STM32F103CBT. This microcontroller is actually part of an on-boardprogrammer and debugger named ST-LINK and is connected to the USB port named “USB ST-LINK”.

  • There’s a second USB port, labeled “USB USER” that is connected to the main microcontroller, theSTM32F303VCT6, and can be used in applications.

The Serial module

Meet your hardware - 图2

We’ll use this module to exchange data between the microcontroller in the F3 and your laptop. Thismodule will be connected to your laptop using an USB cable. I won’t say more at this point.

The Bluetooth module

Meet your hardware - 图3

This module has the exact same purpose as the serial module but it sends the data over Bluetoothinstead of over USB.