Talking to STM boards

Most of the programming takes place through the IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM program and the STMCubeMX which is a software tool for generating what STM calls HAL, a script-like hardware abstraction language version of the code that actually runs the MCU. For the class, STM provided example software projects to which attendees added a few lines of HAL code as an exercise. With the HAL code thus modified, you push a button to have STMCubeMX update the C-code version and download it to the Nucleo board.

A bit of advice: Arrive early if you haven’t already installed the necessary STM tools (STM32CubeMX, STM32Cube WB, STM32CubeProgrammer, STM32CubeMonitorRF, IAR Embedded Workbench) and a terminal emulator (Tera Term) and Java runtime environment. It takes a while to get it all loaded up along with the necessary drivers. You’ll also need to download smartphone apps called LightBlue and possibly ST BLE Sensor.
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