So i have been trying to get this thing to play nice with the Arduino IDE. Its certainly not for the feint of heart and the thinned of skin as it will take some work and a lot of trouble shooting to get this nightmare to run and play nice.
Out of the box the board will not program via USB as the bootloader on the board is basic and requires an external UART programmer like the ST-Link V2. I do now have an ST-Link V2 but have one on the way from an ebay seller, but in the mean time i wanted to play with the micro and see how it performs.
So, with a serial programmer in hand and the 4 wires soldered in I burned a new bootloader that allows the board to be programmed via USB, then stuffed about with drivers to get ones that work and eventually uploaded the blink program and got it working.
The STM32F103 boards have a 72Mhz processor, 64K of Flash and 20K of Ram and a metric ton of interupts. Plenty of resources for everyday Joe’s like me.
Oh, and what ham radio project/s am i going to use this for? Well, you will just have to wait and see. I won’t be providing a full description of how to get these things setup and working either. If you really really really want to do it, you are just going to have to suck it up and do what I did. Spend 2 hours working out each and every problem along the way. Its not as simple as just plugging in your arduino uno board and hitting upload and I have no desire to answer 1000 questions on why something is not working, because what worked for me, might not work for you as it will depend on what tools you are using to make it happen.
