Simply step onto the STMicro floorspace, find a friendly marketing person there and mention a project you (and your company) would like to do and briefly sketch the required hardware. You will be given a voucher to collect your kit later that day at a specially built counter with friendly staff. The counter is easy to find at the wrong end of one of the longest queues at these shows. But you get your ST / Nucleo hardware for free.

Expansion projects

STMicro’s range of expansion boards is equally diversified but less bewildering than their MCU range and the book again does a good job in presenting brief and to the point descriptions. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, stepper motors, BLDC motors, motion MEMS & sensors, LEDs, NFC, gesture detection, and other expansion boards are available. Some of these may require a lot of arm twisting and wheedling to bring home from a show, others are often given away like sweets. Arguably not all expansion boards are used in the projects described in the book.

The projects

In the book, the projects are preceded by short, mostly theoretical chapters on the Nucleo IDE a.k.a. development toolchain (Ch. 3), the STM32 Nucleo processor architecture (Ch. 4), and some example programs using the IDEs (Ch. 5). Here I was happy to read about third-party products like ARM Mbed, MDK-ARM and TrueSTUDIO. STMicro’s own System Workbench is described last, extremely briefly and not getting favoured treatment compared to the other products. Maybe that’s because System Workbench is highly similar to TrueSTUDIO which is also based on Eclipse.
The projects in Chapter 6 are the jewels in the book, not for their originality but all due to the rigid structure upheld for each and very project, from simple to “potentially challenging Clemens Valens”: The structure comprises:
  • Project title
  • Project description
  • Aim of the project
  • Project block diagram
  • Project circuit diagram
  • Project construction
  • Project program listing
  • Description of the program
  • Additional work (optional)

Here’s where we have proof of Dogan Ibrahim’s long experience as a technical author, instructor, lecturer and maker of curricula. All projects in the book have been tried and tested by him.

The circuit diagrams although unambiguous electrically, I found lacking the usual Elektor style and symbols. The program listings on the other hand are not mangled by page layouting. But hold on, you may not have to type anything …

Free software

I was happy to see an old problem with many of Elektor’s “embedded and computing” books rectified with this publication: the availability, free and online, of all code examples discussed in the book. In the past, the publisher wielded a strange policy of supplying a unique code with each book to enable the rightful owner to access the software. In even worse cases, entire software packages duly prepared by book authors were either “in hyperspace” due to constant website migrations, stored in arcane places, or buried deep in the Elektor websites (plural intended).