Cheap STM32 Cortex M4 Development Board STM32F407

I needed a cheap STM32F407 development board for my robot lawn mower project.

The ‘407 was chosen over other members of the 4xx due to the # of timers (for motor control, RPM measurement, ultrasonic distance measurement, RC PPM, etc). The F4xx family was chosen over the other STM32 families due to some timer features only available on the Cortex M4 family. Since I needed also a lot of I/O pins to map the different peripherals of the ARM microcontroller, it had to be at least a 100pin version of the chip.

This left pretty much only the STM32 Discovery line of boards. These boards are really nice, and the on-board peripherals can be disabled via solder-bridges, these boards are designed to run at 3V instead of the more common 3.3V.

Two STM32F407 development boards

Two STM32F407 development boards

That is, until I found a vendor on AliExpress selling exactly what I needed: A cheap (~ US$15 shipped), no-frills, 100pin STM32F407 based development board. The board is very similar to the very common STM32F103 based development boards that can be had for as low as $4. I bought mine here:

Board on AliExpress (sold by “Yu Yue Technology” link to store)

So far I’ve only found this one vendor for this board and that vendor apparently does not have any documentation (schematics, pinouts, etc.) on this board. Since the board is relatively simple, this is not a big downside, and I will attempt to document on this blog what I find out.

STLink/V2 Clone

STLink/V2 Clone


STLink/V2 clone talking to STM32F407

STLink/V2 clone talking to STM32F407


As of now, I’ve only used Texane’s stlink to ensure I can successfully talk to the development board. The programmer is a cheap Chinese clone of the STLink v2:

To be continued …

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  • http://blog.linuxbits.io Manuel

    This looks like the same board (even the mispelled JTAG/JATG matches) but also includes
    schematics and test code sources:
    http://www.sunrom.com/p/stm32-arm-cortex-m4-dev-board

  • http://blog.linuxbits.io Manuel

    “Always buy more than you need” is one of my principles when buying electronic components, so I’m glad I ordered two as I blew up my first STM32F407 board.

    It happened when checking connections / voltages when my mini-robot test platform stopped moving after “cleanly” rewiring between uC and TB6612FNG motor controller boards. Multimeter probe slipped and bridged Vm (motor voltage, 8V) and Vcc (logic supply, 3.3V), sending the STM32F407 to semiconductor heaven.

    Only then I realized that there was another IC on the board, not sure how I missed it, sitting right there, next to the STM32. Turns out its a 4MBit SPI flash (Winbond W25Q32) connected to PA4/5/6/7. There aren’t any solder bridges AFAICS, so I gotta keep that in mind when need PA4-7.
    I had chosen this board specifically because it contained (so I thought) no other external peripherals. Oh well.