[leggomylibro]

I think you can thank this sort of hack for the widespread availability of cheap cloned "ST-Link" debuggers. They use STM32F103 or F102 chips inside, with firmware that was probably lifted from the debuggers on ST's evaluation boards.

As recently as a few years ago, it was unusual to see standalone debugging hardware in the $2-20 range. Sometimes I wonder if ST bristled at the...reuse...of their IP, but it probably did more to promote STM32s as a learning platform than anything that ST did in that time period.

[userbinator]

but it probably did more to promote STM32s as a learning platform than anything that ST did in that time period.

...and thus drive further product sales in the future. If you think about it, sales of development hardware are not going to be frequent nor recurring, while sales of the actual product dominate their profits.

I'm personally glad that companies are starting to see the advantages of freely available documentation and cheap development hardware, and the days of 4/5-figure development boards with secret NDA documentation are slowing passing; ST was (and in some ways still is) one of the notoriously closed ones.

[osamagirl69]

I am not sure if it was always the case, but at least with ST and NXP/freescale you can download the firmware for their debugger from the website for free. I suspect that it was a strategic decision by ST to release their dev kits for cheap (<$10 for a stm32 dev board with programmer!) to drive developer/hobby/edu interest in hopes of people using their chips in production.

Come to think of it, I think it was actually TI and the MSP430 that started the trend with the $4.30 kits with a socketed msp430 micro and onboard programmer. ST was the first to try it with an ARM as far as I know...

[nrp]

Both were likely a response to Arduino presumably increasing the adoption of AVR without Atmel having to do anything. I recall the MSP430 kits being pitched that way in any case.

[saagarjha]

> They use STM32F103 or F102 chips inside, with firmware that was probably lifted from the debuggers on ST's evaluation boards.

I wonder if it was lifted using a ST-Link debugger…

[fest]

There's actually even more than this to low price. I have seen knock-off ST-Link dongles with STM32F103C8 MCUs that are not supposed to have enough flash memory for the stlink firmware, yet they functioned.

How? Turns out they physically have more flash memory, but the accessible flash area is limited by programming tools and documentation to 64KiB (most likely price segmentation, but maybe there's a flash page remapping mechanism that would allow to bin devices based on manufacturing yield).

[markrages]

There is an open-source firmware that is better in many ways. https://github.com/blacksphere/blackmagic

You can even debug on a $2 "blue pill" or wirelessly on a $1 esp8266 board. It has certainly not hindered STM32 popularity.