At last - The STM32F7xx a 216MHz ARM Cortex M7 core for the hobbyist

ARM core microcontrollers have made significant advances over the last few years, and last week saw the commercial release of the STM32F746 - an ARM Cortex M7 core that runs at 216MHz.

With this newly released microcontroller, we now have the means to make a very fast "Arduino".

At the same time as releasing the STM32F7xx range,  ST have made a low cost Discovery Board available.  This breaks with tradition over previous Discovery boards  and is very much all the bells and whistles needed to showcase the new F7 family.

It comes with a 4.3" capacitative TFT colour LCD, and some fairly sophisticated demo software.
In addition it has Ethernet, additional external SDRAM, NAND flash, audio interfaces, camera interface, microSD socket - and what little I/O is left is brought out to Arduino compatible shield headers!

You can read all about the new STM32F7-DISCO board here

More importantly for the hobbyist, the STM32F7xx part is available in a series of LQFP packages - which whist still quite a challenge to solder to a pcb - is not as impossible as Ball Grid Array BGA packages - which need to be machine placed and reflow soldered.

The STM32F746 is available in 100, 144, 176 and 208 pin LQFP packages.  The three larger sizes have additional GPIO ports, and are ideal if you want to drive an LCD using 8 bit RGB parallel data. However, I chose the 100pin package - to keep it simpler for the hobbyist.

I have been using the smaller packages of M4 ARM for about 18 months, and was keen to upgrade to the M7 and at least evaluate the 2X performance increase and the faster I/O.

My current application is particularly I/O intensive - so I needed unhindered access to all the pins. It is a multi-axis motor control board and as such needs 4 quadrature decoders - for rotary position sensing. It also needs 4 USARTS, USB, and complementary PWM for driving two dc motor H-bridges.  There is a user interface consisting of a small (2.8") colour TFT display driven by a SPI bus, 5 user buttons and a scroll wheel encoder - for menu item selection. Further inputs from sensors and safety limit switches mean that virtually all of the 80 I/O lines are  committed.

Having read the datasheet, I found that the 100 pin LQFP package is not quite pin compatible with the STM32F407 Cortex M4 device.  ST Microelectronics have chosen to add another power pin, and as a result, shifted 30 of the I/O pins one place to the left.  (The other 70 are in their original locations). This was going to need some board modifications compared to my M4 designs - but then I had the idea of  making a simple Break Out Board, which would be pin header compatible with the STM F4 Discovery Board.

Whilst the new STM32F7-DISCO board is a superb showcase for the new F7 microcontroller - the lack of free GPIO and access to peripherals made it too limiting for my application - so I decided to bite the bullet and make a very simple dev board - with every signal broken out to pin headers.

Anyone familiar with the F4 Discovery board will see that this has the same pin headers. The ST-Link section of the board is not present - as it is assumed that the user will already have a ST-Link or other means to program the board.

On the left is a mini-B USB connector which will power the board, and the mcu can run USB VCP firmware to communicate with a PC. In addition USART 1 and USART 3 are broken out in the form of FTDI compatible headers.  USART 1 can be used to bootload firmware onto the board - which I  have conveniently included RESET and BOOT switches for this purpose.  All STM32F devices (and virtually all manufacturers ARM core devices come with a factory bootloader, to allow for some simple means of programming).

In addition to a 5V supply, the board uses a MCP1640 boost regulator - and can run on voltages down to about 1V. This allows the use of LiPo or even alkaline cells to power the board.

The board is fitted with an 8MHz crystal for the main oscillator - with an on-chip PLL that synthesises the main clock at 216MHz, and a 32768Hz watch crystal for the Real Time Clock. There is also an 0.22F supercapacitor to maintain the RTC registers and the non volatile RAM.

The STM32F7xx offers a performance increase of approximately 2.2 over the previous F4 series.  It has built in display controller - so ideally suited to driving LCD panels in parallel mode. The larger LQFP packages (144, 176, 208) are ideal for direct drive of LCD panels using 8 bit RGB. There is 128K extra RAM and an external memory interface  - over and above what the F4 offered.

Costing.

Digikey, Farnell/Newark and Mouser hold stock of the STM32F746VGT6 100 pin  microcontroller.

It's one off price is about $17.75 or  $16.16 in 10 off

The 66 x 66mm pcb could be sourced from low cost board manufacturers for about $2.20 in 10 off quantity - such as SeeedStudio PCB service

So for about $25 outlay  - you could have a very capable 216MHz ARM board which can ultimately be programmed with open source tools - such as GCC, Arduino, Python, Javascript etc.

Final Impressions.

The STM32F7xx range represent the current state of the art in ARM devices to be used stand-alone in microcontroller mode- without the use of an operating system.

They contain a very rich mix of GPIO and periperals, plus the ability to drive a colour LCD - for applications where a modern user interface is needed.

At the same time, you have full access to the I/O ports - allowing you to drive I/O at up to 108MHz  - which makes for a very versatile real time controller - to interface with sensors and actuators.

USB and ethernet is on-chip (but the ethernet will need an external phy device).  ST Microelectronics provide a library of standard peripheral firmware and USB plus TCP/IP stack to allow these devices to be used to maximum advantage.

Whilst this device runs at better than 200MHz - it is only a single core device.  It is not in the same league as the 900MHz 4 core Raspberry-Pi 2, nor should it be considered to be.  It's more equivalent to a high speed Arduino Due, than a low end Pi.

The difference is that a hobbyist skilled at soldering can make and repair one of these for themself, and use it as the basis of new designs, whereas the Pi, relying heavily on BGA devices is well beyond the scope of amateur construction. The breakout board shows that you can still put a microcontroller, but a fast one, down onto a simple pcb, with crystal and reset circuit, and a serial USART connection, and with minimum effort using opensource programming tools have it up and running code.