Programming STM32 Microcontroller Flash in Linux

Created on: 28 August 2012

In Linux a command line program can be used to program STM32 microcontrollers via the embedded ST-LINK found on evaluation boards such as the STM32 Value Line Discovery board.

In this tutorial, a STM32 value line discovery board is programmed in Ubuntu Linux 11.10.

Downloading and Installing the Software

The files for the ST-LINK program can be found on texane's stlink page at github.com. A tutorial on how to install and use the st-flash command line program is available – click the "Raw" button to open the pdf file.

The following instructions will show you how to install st-flash on Ubuntu 11.10:

1. First install dependencies. Open a terminal window and enter:

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev git

Another dependency is pkg-config which should already be installed on Ubuntu.

2. In the terminal window, change to a suitable directory to work from and enter:

git clone https://github.com/texane/stlink stlink.git

3. Change to the new directory and then make the project. Enter these two lines in the terminal window:

cd stlink.git
make

4. Copy the st-flash file to the file system.

In the stlink.git directory where you ran the "make" command, there is a directory called flash that contains the st-flash program. To copy it to the file system, first change to the flash directory and then copy the file. In the terminal window, enter:

cd flash
sudo cp st-flash /usr/bin

5. Set up udev rules so that it is possible to run st-flash without using the sudo command. Change back to the stlink.git directory and then copy the rules files to the file system. In the terminal window enter:

cd ..
sudo cp *.rules /etc/udev/rules.d

6. Finally enter:

sudo restart udev

Programming the STM32 Flash

Plug the STM32 value line discovery board into a spare USB port on the Linux PC.

In a terminal window, change to the directory containing the binary file that you want to load to the STM32 value line discovery board. Enter:

st-flash write v1 myflash.bin 0x8000000

Where myflash is the name of your binary file to load. If you get an error message, then try using sudo in front of the above command or try rebooting the system.