STM32 THING PLUS: NO SHOW IN COM PORTS BUT DOES SHOW BOOT LOADER

Development Boards Arduino
1

Hello!

I am using the excellent STM32 Thing Plus https://www.sparkfun.com/products/17712 as the core for a new prototype that requires some sophisticated embedded software.

We have many of them and I have successfully used them time and again, uploading via the official Arduino IDE (coding in Atom) and using the serial port to debug. I have done this many times with no issues after following the instructions here https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/st … 1616530414 to set up.

Now, something very odd is happening. After an upload in which I tried to turn OFF my Serial while() loop so that I could run it disconnected from the computer, I found that the board is no longer registering in the COM ports of either my PC or Mac. Interestingly it still runs the last sketch uploaded just fine, in which it reads several sensors, several more inputs, runs 4 separate light strips, and displays a bunch of info on an OLED screen.

Here’s the kicker: when I put it into bootloading mode, it DOES show up in USB Devices (NOT COM) as STM32 BOOTLOADER, which I have never seen before. I’m attaching a screenshot to show what I mean.

I repeated this with another one I had laying around. At this point I’m scared to upload anything anymore for fear of bricking them all!

So the questions are:

  1. How could this possibly happen?

  2. Is there a way to somehow reflash it leveraging the fact that it does show up in some capacity?

Thank you so much for your help, this has been holding us up for over a week and I’m at my wits end.

Screenshot 2022-10-05 193724.png

2

Hmmmm, not too familiar with the code on this one. Not sure why you are running into the issue that you see.

There is a forum specifically for STM32 and Arduino that you might have more luck looking at or posting in.

I found this thread that might be helpful, however, this user’s issue ended up being a hardware one: https://www.stm32duino.com/viewtopic.ph … over#p1842