STM32 Blue Pill vs Black Pill Microcontroller Boards 

*It's over for microcontrollercels* Chaduino is worse, but is more popular and has a chiseled charging port

The RU-vid algorithm is gonna have a fun time with this one.

Its over for v-saucecels

Oh I see! When my boss told me to get a couple of "blue pills" I thought he was overstepping personal boundaries.

Bluepilled beta's running at 72 MHz, meanwhile blackpill sigma's running at 100MHz... or as I like to say 0.1GHz!

Based and Blackpilled

It's over for Espressifcells

I didn't expect this lol

Once you go Black Pill, you can never return to the Blue Pill.

Note that F103 can't use CAN and USB at the same time; the peripherals memory maps overlap.

Gary, fantastic explanation! Thank you!

Based and blackpilled.

Cuts to the chase for me, Thanks Gary : )

Interesting as always New hardware Thanks for sharing👍😀

Well done and very understandable, thank you.

Gary, thanks a lot for this very helpful video. I have a blackpill (F411) working as you describe, with both LED and serial port working. I'm programming through the USB interface, using the STM32Cube programmer. I cannot get the USBSerial object to work! I'm wondering whether it's an inconstancy between the blackpill board and the NUCLEO-F411RE board layouts (some incompatible USB setup parameter perhaps). I have the USBSerial instantiation statement at the start of the program, and when run the program never gets beyond this statement. I've tried blocking and non-blocking (true and false arguments to the USBSerial call) but the PC (Windows unfortunately) never picks up a new USB serial device. Have you managed to get the USB Serial functionality working using mbed, and if so, can you post your code? Thanks again for your really helpful videos!

Without trying too hard, I programmed my black pill by adding stm32 implementation to the ardiuno ide, exported the compiled binary, and used the st programmer in usb mode to program it. You have to press 2 buttons on the black pill in an order to get it into rom bootloader.

15:30 oh, yeah~, Black Pill Microcontroller Board does toggle the LED which so useful to me. :)

We started switching from Cortex M4 based MCUs to Cortex-M33 ones for our BLE applications.

Very cool explanation 😊

Gary, you are awesome :)

I've hoped to see performance comparison instead of wiring and blinking, but at least it was interesting to know how to upload code and receive messages from MCU.

Great tutorial, where are those "defines"? DigitalOut and Serial? There are probably more, where is the documentation? Thanks

Hi Gary could you make a video on ESP32 ?

Nice video, keep it up, thank you :)

Mbed Studio works like a charm!

what is the limitation with mbed OS and the IDE ?? can i use it fully to upload big amount of code? would this replace arduino?

"With the blue pill, enlarge your possibilities!" Oh wait, the black pill is here. Well fuck. Hey at least it still has better performances than the Arduino Nano

Also the datasheet for the microcontroller on the Black Pill states that it comes with not only a serial bootloader, but also a USB one. Blue Pill only has a serial one

you got a new subscriber😊

Anyone know how to get a footprint for the 401 version to use in KiCad? The product page has a link to github, but it's a bit sparse on dimensions and the only file I could find that looked relevant has a .intLib extension, which KiCad can't open.

Why not flashing directly with the on board USB port? Serial programming is available, but not the only solution, there's a dedicated pdf on the ST website, which explains which flashing modes are available. Cheers

just picked up the 411 discovery for myself, nice to see this video a couple hours later :D. will be using it’s adcs, dma and usb to make a joystick (and that’s just my first project) i’ll have to borrow the usb c schematic of these if i get these pcb’d

It's amazing how cheap a lot of this stuff has gotten. I remember 15+ years ago $5 got you an ATmega32 (8-bit, 32K flash, 2K ram) on a DIP-40 with a max speed of 16 MHz, and all you had was the chip. Now you get a 32 bit, 100 MHz+ microcontroller with a mind numbing amount of peripherals (and hardware floating point) on a carrier board with the ability to use a proper debugger for the same price. I can't tell you how much time I spent printf debugging with bit-banged serial because the only real UART was tied up doing something else.

You don't need a USB to serial converter, the black pill has a DFU bootloader, so you can use the usb directly

Holy god, 22KB of flash consumed with just a simple blink sketch. Is that from Mbed or just ST's default Standard Peripheral Library

Hi Gary, I tried follwing you video but when i'm trying to compile, I get an error mbed.h file is not found What do I need to do? Thanks

You can use Arduino IDE or VScode with Arduino extension, you will just need the Arduino_Core_STM32 from github. If you use the STM32CubeProgrammer you don,t need that FTDI at all, just plug the cable and do exactly same thing to go bootloader mode, the device will show up as HID

Thank you for introducing these devices. They are very promising! May I ask, how much data could STM32 pump through it?

Hi i have the STM32F411CE M4 i am trying to use 2 SERIAL PORTS.... one for a bluetooth module and one as serial to the Arduino serial monitor. how do i configure to use more than one serial port on the STM32F411CE ? many thanks.

Just a minor correction to the comparison table at 3:10, the STM32F103C8 micros on the bluepills do have only 4 timers; 1 advanced and 3 general purpose. ttps://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/stm32f103c8.pdf

*GARY!* *Good Evening Professor!* *Good Evening Fellow Classmates!*

The STM32F411CEU present in the Black pill board doesn't have a native CAN interface. But it supports up to 5 I2S buses ITOH, 2 of them in full-duplex.

Good vid overhaul, however you require a ST-LINK V2 (minimum) or preferably a ST-LINK V2-1 or V3 giving you SWO trace for debugging (recommend the later). FTDI may work to program the mcu (extra-poor man solution?) however it is completely irrelevant to STM and debugging :/

I'm more of a red pill guy. But cool

LDAR

Mbed is a c++ environment! I have used it extensively with the nucleo.

I noticed that you left the YELLOW jumper in the 5 V position ? Will the STM32 chip survive 5 V into it's RX pin over time ?

Maybe this is a silly question, but if the board has a USB-C connector, why the need for the FTDI adapter?

Didn't knew there exists Chinese stm32 board with 400 series chip. Thanks for the info!

Does ST have any support for configuration via Linux?

Bluepill is for simps xD

Damn the comments :D

It seems there's this, nucleo, and teensy which has usb.

nice, now debate facelms

They really need to make a red pill.

Can you make a video on usb mode for programing

Will it work with 921600 baud rate?

Why not use ST-Link?

Hi Gary. I've for a request and plea for a video....Support for non-FOTA NONOS ESP8266-01 WiFi module ended some time ago, in that the "eagle" based bin files were no longer included in the SDK. There seems to be vague instruction that these bon files can be compiled e.g. @t (python utility) and usually from in Linux. It would be great to be able to flash the ESP-01's with the latest firmware as it's less buggy and gives good new AT commands to the module. I am thinking about the 1MB (8Mbit) 'black' silkscreen modules. Could I appeal to you technical skills to make a video on this to allow the many millions of these modules to operate at a better level. I really appreciate all the help you give us and would love it if you can crack this problem. Thanks.

Blue pill, Black pill.. How do you call board same as Bleu but with STM32F303 chip?

what about DFU download? only a usb cable is required, no programmer needed.

where are you getting these $4 F411's ?? All the ones I can find are around 30 USD. There are some cheaper F401 and F407, no F411.

Great

I wish there was a version of stm microcontroller in dip package. So that i would use only documentation to program it

Nice video but watching you wire up that bread board is driving my OCD crazy :)

These can easily be programmed through USB via DFU

I don't know which evil marketing guy has come up with that kind of confusion-kung-fu for us. The originally black pill was based on STM32F103 like the blue one, featuring mounting holes, one sided component placement and a micro USB connector that doesn't fall off when you look at it at an angle. Also you doesn't mention some "big" features of the blue pill: The 3.3V voltage regulator is very small (current wise) and you will most likely have the wrong pull-up resistors making USB-connections a gamble. That's no problem at all and easy to fix for that price, but better to keep such things in mind. So whats wrong with this "thing" ... should we call it Black Pill v2 ... Black Pill 401? Thanks for the video, Gary and showing off this new toy. ...and for the follow up with all the stumbling blocks and traps of that thing:) web.archive.org/web/20190527040051/wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill web.archive.org/web/20190621211652/wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Black_Pill

Garry rocks

a little correction, you can use an sd card on a blue pill. ive done it on a G0 series mcu from st. the difference is the F4 mcu has quad spi, this is what the SDIO uses. it allows an sd card to communicate at a higher speed.

As USB/Serial adapter, I'd recommend the "golden CH340G" (good search term) instead, as it can deliver 150mA instead of only 50mA from that red board. While 50 mA may be enough for some boards, it is quite low if you go into MCU chips with Wifi (like ESP32 and ESP8266).

that's funny looking man!

Please zoom in to your code / web pages so it's legible even on mobile phone screens

Hi, i am building a foot controller for a friend who lost his arms in an accident and i want to know if i can use this as an hid device to control 3 arcade buttons?

It should be noted there are a lot of counterfeit FTDI adapters floating around from the usual suspects. The chip looks the same but inside the package is a cobbled together bunch of crap(search online for people that took it apart and looked at it.). It will id as FTDI and run the drivers but give inexplicable errors that are really hard to run down.

I recommend FT232RL FTDI as USB to Serial Converter.

they need to refine the download & flash process its taking way too many steps slowing down the learning process and potentially keeping people from keep using it, no matter what its capable of. arduino is doing exactly that, one click and its done, on almost all boards. some just need a reset button to be clicked once.

My experience with the black pill has been very promising. For the cost, it's remarkable. A few dollars only and you get 84Mhz clock, an FPU and buckets of functionality. I have been leery of the tools like the ST-MX where I saw something like this in the Motorola tools a few years ago - these were expensive and kind-of-hard-wired you into a programming model that hid the details far too much (for mine).However the ST MX toolset enables you rather than channelling you. Initialization and start up configuration is a snap. Having spent the last few years with the PIC32 and ICD3 plus a $1,000 compiler (back in 2009) these tools are unprecedentedly inexpensive and versatile and enabling. I still have not got the ADC in the PIC32 running properly yet. It's just so complex. The ARM STM401ccu6 ADC is 12 bits compared with 10 bits for the PIC - 4 times the resolution (on a $5 board!) and with black pill and ST-MX I simply say I want the ADC to run, interrupt driven and I'm pretty much done. (well almost!)

It has USB, but to program it one has to jump through a dozen hoops, no wonder all the electronics I bought recently sucks a big one (meaning morons so entrenched in the past designed it so that all the advances in hardware are brought to nill). I wonder why they haven't brought back videocassette recorders or 8-tracks.

So what is the USB-C used for?

This thing has USB, why is the USB/Serial converter necessary?

Can it run linux?

these newer microcontrollers are finally catching up with the P8X32A @80-120MHz

Never began

Now the costs are like 10+dollars.. Any idea why the cost spike?

Hi gary i got every bit but what is FPU??

"This is C"..........Looks at source file extension(cpp).......i dunno about that one chief

It costs $10 now

Using the blue pill with kiel was a pain

So you have to compile on a website (in which some features may or may not be free) and download to the local folder and use a flasher and use putty for console? Brilliant! I will stick with Arduino!

does anyone know how I can program my Black Pill from Linux?

Now i can make a diy F4 drone flight controller 😏😏😏

No CAN is a no-go for me sadly ://

переходная есть еще Blue Pill + синяя но с кнопками

Online compiler eyh? So what happens when this goes end-of-life and I hypothetically still have about 30 of these laying around? Do they suddenly become useless because the compiler is gone with the wind? I think I'll keep my wallet closed if that is the case..

Why not use the much better esp32 or 8266. the 32 is dual core and much faster. It comes with 8 touchpins by default. They only cost 1 dollar more at 5.00. On top of that you can run micropython on the esp32 and 8266 and it is much easier /quicker to program.

Why oh why couldn't they spend the extra pennies and use an F4 version with CAN.

Doesn't seem to talk much about what the difference on the pill boards - the pinouts, for example - actually are.

No wonder the company doesnt provide a loader how bad is it they have a superior board but you have to do all this twaddling around just to get it to work, where the ardiouno just plugs in and is up and running.

If I ever run into the need for more memory or more power or peripherals (like a hardware calendar RTC that the Blue Pill doesn't have), might consider spending a bit more for the black pill. Otherwise I think the Blue Pill (a genuine one, not a fake one) is still well capable for many applications, at least compared to an Arduino nano/pro mini.