Q's about STM32 Thing Plus

Development Boards
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Finally pulled my STM32 Thing Plus out again to figure out what application (model railroading related) I can apply it to. Did discover that I cannot program it with the Raspberry Pi version of the Arduino IDE because the STM32Cube (sp?) doesn’t work on ARM processors, so pulled the Windows laptop back out. I was able to successfully run the Blink and I2C Scanner examples, although the latter wouldn’t build until I replaced SDA1 and SCL1 with SDA and SCL. That’s an issue with the website’s guide document.

Another issue with the guide is that it states two or three times that to upload, first you press and hold BOOT, then press and release RESET, then release BOOT. Then you can have the IDE build and load. That works. One spot on the page says you have to hold BOOT pressed until the upload completes. That’s inconsistent and incorrect.

Now questions:

  1. Yellow CHG light comes on when LiPo battery is connected and USB-C is plugged in. When the battery gets to full charge, does the CHG LED turn… oh, the LED just now turned off, red PWR LED still lit. Okay, guess that one is answered. :sweat_smile:
  2. Does the board allow code to monitor the battery voltage so that a LOW_BAT warning can be issued, or do a clean shutdown before the board just shuts off?
  3. Is the board restricted to taking SDHC cards or will it accept larger-capacity SDXC cards too?
  4. Since the processor has internal RAM and has access to external RAM as well, as far as we programmers are concerned is that a single bank of RAM, or two separate ones? If separate, how do we access the one (external I assume) that’s not used by default for variables & such?

That’s all I have for now. I reserve the right to think up more questions on the Thing Plus.

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2- No, nothing built into the board monitors the battery.

3- Any SD card, it’s code depedant.

4- Separate, check the data sheet for your external ram for details on how to interface with it

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Thanks.

All three of those details would be very useful information to have been included in the guide page for this Thing Plus… thing.

Especially the “code dependent” part of accessing different types of SD cards, I’ve never seen that necessary anywhere else.

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It’s difficult to list features that a product doesn’t have in its guide…

Writing to SD card is always code dependent…there are many libraries to choose from…they were saying the compatibility depends on the code pushing/pulling data to/from the SD card. Some larger cards give problems with older libraries…but most any 32gb or smaller SDXC card is good to go for most all cases

As for what RAM registers do what…like they said, that’ll only be in the datasheet. The guide is a mostly layman’s walkthrough, not a thorough exposition of everything the board does (that’s what datasheets do)