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Getting started with STM8 development using free software: Serial output on the EX-STM8-Q64a-207

This short tutorial presents a simple "Hello World" program for the WaveShare EX-STM8-Q64a-207 board, either the premium version (which includes the DVK501) or the standard version with an extra RS232 board. The author used a Debian GNU/Linux system, but the tutorial should work for other Linux distributions, *BSD or other Unices.

The tools we use are

Hardware setup

EX-STM8-Q64a-207 Premium EX-STM8-Q64a-207 Standard with RS232 board

The EX-STM8-Q64a-207 is connected to power via a USB power cable. To write our program to the board, a stlinkv2 is attached. Depending on wether we use the premium version or the standard version with RS232 board, the communication setup is different: For the EX-STM8-Q64a-207 Premium we connect the DVK501 board via the BUS-B connector, which will do for both data and power; the serial cable is then connected to the UART0 header of the DVK50. For the EX-STM8-Q64a-207 Standard with RS232 board, we connect the RS232 board to the PD5 and PD6 headers for data (TxIN to PD5, RxOUT to PD6) and to the power header for power (VCC to +5V, GND to GND); the serial cable is then attached to the RS232 board. On the other end the serial cable is attached to an RS232 port on a computer running a terminal program configured for 9600 baud, no parity, 8 bits, 1 stop bit and no flow control. We used a USB-to-serial converter and gtkterm.

Get SDCC

Depending on your operating system there might be an easy way to install SDCC 3.5.0 or newer using a package system or similar (e.g. apt-get install sdcc on Debian). While SDCC 3.4.0 should be sufficient for this tutorial, you might want to try a newer version in case you encounter any bugs. In particular, SDCC 3.4.0 has an issue with the library search path; this can be worked around by explicitly specifying the path to the standard library when linking.

SDCC binaries or a source tarball can be downloaded from its website.

Get stm8flash

The stm8flash source can be found at its GitHub location, where there is also a download link for a zip archive of the sources. To compile it, a C compiler, such as gcc, pkg-config and libusb need to be installed. Unzip the archive (e.g. using unzip stm8flash-master.zip) change into the directory stm8flash-master and type make. In case there are any errors, such as header files not found, check that pkg-config and development files for libusb are installed.

The Demo

We present a simple Demo that repeatedly outputs "Hello World!" on UART3. This demonstrates setting up and using the UART for serial I/O. Here is the C code:

// Source code under CC0 1.0
#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdio.h>

#define CLK_DIVR	(*(volatile uint8_t *)0x50c6)
#define CLK_PCKENR1	(*(volatile uint8_t *)0x50c7)

#define UART3_SR	(*(volatile uint8_t *)0x5240)
#define UART3_DR	(*(volatile uint8_t *)0x5241)
#define UART3_BRR1	(*(volatile uint8_t *)0x5242)
#define UART3_BRR2	(*(volatile uint8_t *)0x5243)
#define UART3_CR2	(*(volatile uint8_t *)0x5245)
#define UART3_CR3	(*(volatile uint8_t *)0x5246)

#define UART_CR2_TEN (1 << 3)
#define UART_CR3_STOP2 (1 << 5)
#define UART_CR3_STOP1 (1 << 4)
#define UART_SR_TXE (1 << 7)

int putchar(int c)
{
	while(!(UART3_SR & UART_SR_TXE));

	UART3_DR = c;

	return(c);
}

void main(void)
{
	unsigned long i = 0;

	CLK_DIVR = 0x00; // Set the frequency to 16 MHz
	CLK_PCKENR1 = 0xFF; // Enable peripherals

	UART3_CR2 = UART_CR2_TEN; // Allow TX and RX
	UART3_CR3 &= ~(UART_CR3_STOP1 | UART_CR3_STOP2); // 1 stop bit
	UART3_BRR2 = 0x03; UART3_BRR1 = 0x68; // 9600 baud

	for(;;)
	{
		printf("Hello World!\n");
		for(i = 0; i < 147456; i++); // Sleep
	}
}

SDCC is a freestanding, not a hosted implemenatation of C, and allows main to return void. Note that up to SDCC 3.6.0 putchar() returns void. This is not standard compliant and was change to int in current SDCC versions. The printf() from the standard library uses putchar() for output. Since putchar() is device-specific we need to supply it. In this case we want it to output data using UART1.

The demo can be compiled simply by invocing SDCC using sdcc -mstm8 --std-c99 serial.c assuming the C code is in serial.c. The option -mstm8 selects the target port (stm8). An .ihx file with a name corresponding to the source file will be generated.

Put the demo onto the board

Assuming stm8flash and serial.ihx are in the same directory, the board is attached through an stlinkv2 device, ./stm8flash -c stlinkv2 -p stm8s207r8 -w serial.ihx will write the demo onto the board. You can see the "Hello world" by attaching a serial cable to the DB9 connector on the RS232 or DVK501 board, and using a terminal program configured for 9600 baud, no parity, 8 bits, 1 stop bit and no flow control.


More about stm8flash

stm8flash was written by Valentin Dudouyt. It works both with stlink (including the one integrated on the discovery boards) and stlinkv2 devices. The programmer can be selected using -c stlink or -c stlinkv2. The target device is selected using the -p option (to get a list of target devices, use the -p option with an option argument that is not an stm8 device, e.g. -p help. stm8flash will treat filenames ending in .ihx or .hex as Intel hex, and other filenames as binaries.

More about SDCC

SDCC was initially written by Sandeep Dutta for the MCS-51, and has a relatively conservative architecture (see Sandeep Dutta, "Anatomy of a Compiler", 2000). It has been extended by various contributors and more recently, incorporated some cutting-edge technologies, in particular in register allocation (see Philipp Klaus Krause, "Optimal Register Allocation in Polynomial Time", 2013). The stm8 backend was mostly written by Philipp Klaus Krause for his research into bytewise register allocation and spilling (see Philipp Klaus Krause, "Bytewise Register Allocation", 2015).

SDCC is a C compiler that aims to be compliant with the C standards.

Important compiler options for STM8 developers include: