Developing STM32 microcontroller code on Linux (Part 1 of 8, introduction)

Recently I've been playing with the STM32, which is a small microcontroller made by ST. These seem to be pretty great microcontroller chips; they are relatively fast (depending on what model you get), have a decent amount of flash (up to 1MB), and have a decent amount of memory (up to 192KB). It is also easy to get development boards for them; there is a line of boards called the STM32DISCOVERY boards that are really cheap and easy to get. It is possible to work on these chips entirely with open source tools, which is important to me.

This series of posts will go through all of the steps necessary to develop on these boards. Note that all of this is covered elsewhere on the web, but a lot of the information is either outdated or scattered. I'll build all of the pieces from the ground up to get a working set of tools and binaries that you can use to develop your own STM32 applications.

To start with, I'm going to describe my hardware setup. I have a laptop running Fedora 19 x86_64. This is my main development machine, and this is going to be the host for everything I do with the STM32. For an STM32 board, I have an STM32F3DISCOVERY board, as shown here. However, note that for most of the posts, the exact board that you have isn't that important. As long as it is one of the STM32F*DISCOVERY boards, the steps below will mostly apply. The differences will become more important when we start to actually write code that deals with the GPIOs (as the GPIOs differ per board), but for the development environment they are really all quite similar.

This series of posts will do the steps in the following order:

1. In order to do anything, we need a cross compiler. This is a set of tools that runs on our development environment (Fedora 19 x86_64), but emit instructions for our target hardware (STM32 ARM). Besides the C/C++ compiler, this also includes things like the assembler and linker. Part of the cross-compile toolchain also includes a minimal libc-like environment to program in, which gives you access to <stdio.h> and other familiar header files and functions. We will build a cross compile environment from binutils, gcc, and newlib.
2. Once we have a cross-compiler, we need some way to debug the programs we write. The simplest thing to do here is to build gdb, the GNU debugger. Unfortunately we can't just use the system gdb, as that generally only understands how to debug and disassemble code on your development machine architecture. So we'll build our own version of gdb that understands ARM.
3. With the debugger finished, we need some way to take the compiled version of our code and put it onto the target device. The STM32 devices use something called STLinkV2, which is a multi-purpose communication protocol (generally over USB). In order to upload our code to the device, we need a piece of software the speaks this protocol. Luckily there is OpenOCD, the Swiss Army Knife of communication protocols. We'll need to build a version of this that runs on our development machine, but knows how to speak STLinkV2. In this step we'll also build a configuration file that can communicate over STLinkV2.
4. With the communications taken care of, we need a device library. This is basically an abstraction layer that allows us to talk directly to the hardware on the target device. For the purposes of these posts we are going to use libopencm3. This step will build libopencm3 for the target device.
5. Once we have libopencm3 built, we have to know how to link programs so that they run on the STM32. This step will discuss linker scripts and command-line directives necessary to build programs that run on the STM32.
6. Here we build our first simple program, upload it to the STM32, and watch it run! Finally!
7. For bonus, I discuss running a simple Real-Time Operating System on the STM32, FreeRTOS. Using this will allow you to define several tasks and have the RTOS switch between them, much like tasks on a full-fledged OS. This opens up new possibilities and new problems, some of which will be discussed.

Whew, that's a lot of steps just to get the equivalent of "Hello World" running on the board. However, it should be educational and collect a lot of this information together in one place.