I came across the “Black Magic Probe” (code on GitHub), a while ago, and recently found out (and here) that it should be supported on these Chinese STLink-V2 clones that you can find on eBay and Aliexpress for really cheap ($2-$5).

I had already bought one a few months back, so I ordered another one to use one as a programmer to load the Black Magic Probe code into the second STLink clone.

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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 …