Software development

For software development several options are available. The quick and easy way is to use the online tools on the mbed website, but not all the boards seem to be available (yet). For offline programming there are the traditional IDEs from IAR and Keil, but also the free GCC-based IDE TrueStudio from Atollic. Before you can use your board, you must first install a driver for the ST-Link. Unfortunately this is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation, but you can get it here. You are supposed to do this before you connect the board to the computer for the first time, but afterwards will work too. Two drivers will be installed, an STLink Virtual COM Port and an STLink Dongle.

There will also be a thumb drive added to your system and on it there is a link to the mbed environment. Click on it and if you have an account (free) the board will be added to your platforms. A list of example programs is shown too that you can import into your workspace. If you use mbed you won’t have anything to install besides this and programming the board is now as simple as copying a file to a thumb drive. The board resets automatically after uploading a program.

If you work offline then you should also download the libraries that go with the board. There is a different package for every MCU family, i.e. a board with an L0 processor needs the STM32CubeL0 package, whereas you want the STM32CubeF4 package for a board with an F4 on it. If, like me, you own several Nucleo boards, you may spend quite some time on downloading all the libraries.