November 21, 2020

Black Pill boards - so many to choose from

I ordered my first black pill (made by cuiisw) 3 years ago. Somewhere I have 10 of these, based on STM32F411CEU6.

I recently ordered a second batch, made by WeAct with USB-C connector.

Ignoring the black PCB versions of the STM32F103 "blue pill", I have noted that there is a vast variety of boards based on F4xx chips. They all seem to be based on a Cortex-M4 (whereas the F103 is a Cortex-M3). What I read is that these are identical except that the M4 includes SIMD instructions aimed at DSP applications.

All of the black pill boards seem to sell for about $5. Some have a micro-USB connector, but it seems that most these days have a USB-C connector. Some have 40 pins on a side, others have 38, but offer mounting holes.

F103    72 Mhz	20K ram,  64K of flash
F401    84 Mhz	64K ram, 256K of flash
F411   100 Mhz 128K ram, 512K of flash
Note that the letters after the F411 are important. The above are F411CEU6 parts. If you look at an ST datasheet you will see that different letters can indicate different amounts of ram and flash.

There are also nicely priced boards in a different shape with:

F405    168 Mhz  192K ram, 1M flash
F412    100 Mhz  256K ram, 512K flash
F446    180 Mhz  128K ram, 512K flash
G474    170 Mhz  128K ram, 512K flash
Of these, the F412 interests me because of the greater RAM.

AT32 (Artery) boards

Also there are a series of AT32 (not STM32) parts with similar numbers such as AT32F403. The offer higher clock speeds (240Mhz). What about documentation? AT is apparently "Artery" -- proceed with caution!


Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]