Bravokeyl's Build Log

Hola! everyone!

I’m an engineer with an electronics background. I’m trying to learn to work with bare chips available in the market.

This quarter, I will be building a base board for STM32F407VGT6 chip exposing all pins but focusing to make 4UART’s, 1 I2C, 1 SDIO easily connect-able.

This board will have one RTC ( PCF8523 on the board ) with coin-cell holder, mircoSD memory socket.

Taking the reference schematics of STMF4Discovery, Base board.

The reason for making this base board is get a feel that we can do everything from scratch.

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That’s awesome! We did something similar in a past version of the course called Central Command, but it was a much smaller chip (the STM32F030 family).

That 100 pin LQFP looks fun :slight_smile: Any experience with fine pitch parts like that?

Welcome @bravokeyl . Looking forward to seeing your project updates.

I don’t have any experience building these kinds of projects(my first one). I hope to fail as many times as I can to get the final build which is exactly what I wanted.

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Last week, I started reading/referring on the important features/blocks that we shouldn’t miss in the design, already available boards schematics.

Referred Application Notes:

  • STM32F4xxx MCU Hardware development - AN4488
  • BOOT Mode management - AN2606
  • Design recommendations for Oscillator - AN2867

Referred Boards schematics

Helper Script:

Created a small NodeJS KiCad helper script to generate pins draw format which is very useful if the chip package is big like 100,144,172pins. This script can be found here.

Github repo for the project - stm32f407vgt6

Awesome app-notes! I always find the hard thing with app notes (especially the 100+ page ones) is keeping alert throughout the entire thing. It’s often a single line that will make or break your design. For example a note like, ‘Do not use pins 23 and 24 for anything other than programming pins’ (an example only, have not read those notes).