New Industry Products

Low-Cost Development Boards for 32-bit MCUs

January 28, 2016 by Jeff Shepard

With the introduction of the STM32 Nucleo-144 series of low-cost, compact development boards, STMicroelectronics has further extended its support for the STM32 family of 32-bit Flash microcontrollers. The new 144-pin boards enhance the existing STM32 development ecosystem through increased connectivity that enables customers to quickly develop applications using any STM32 microcontroller, from the most power-efficient to the highest-performing devices.

The new boards are fully compatible with the existing STM32 development ecosystem, including the range of dedicated plug-in application expansion boards that allow specialized features ranging from motor drives to motion and environmental sensors to be easily incorporated into the final application. Moreover, they offer unlimited extension capability via three types of connector: in addition to the Arduinoâ„¢ Uno and ST morpho connectors provided by existing Nucleo-64 boards, the new boards include an ST zio connector.

Together, these three connectors give complete access to all of the STM32 general-purpose I/O pins, allowing easy implementation of any creative function. Selected STM32 Nucleo-144 boards include Ethernet, as well as USB FS OTG ports to ease connections to local/wide area networks.

The STM32 Nucleo-144 boards allow the entire embedded processing community, from hobbyists and students to the most experienced professional system developers, to rapidly test, optimize, and industrialize new applications built around the industry’s most popular, affordable, and efficient 32-bit microcontroller family.

All of the STM32 Nucleo-144 boards include an integrated ST-Link debugger/programmer, which eliminates the need for a separate debug probe, and are compatible with the most popular development toolchains including IAR EWARM, Keil MDK-ARM, and GCC/ LLVM-based IDEs such as AC6 SW4STM32 or Atollic TrueStudio.

The new boards will be ARM® mbed™-enabled during Q2 2016, giving designers free access to ARM mbed online tools that do not require any software installation. The first four boards (NUCLEO-F746ZG, NUCLEO-F429ZI, NUCLEO-F446ZE and NUCLEO-F303ZE) are available now at US$23 for the Ethernet versions and US$19 without Ethernet.