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STM32F1 aka the Blue Pill ( not the original one ) - Part I


The Blue pill came to my radar whenever I was searching for a simple Arm Cortex  M based development board for simple automation. The cost was also around Rs. 200 to 300 only but I used to think it might be under-powered as I assumed it to be a CORTEX M0 or M0+ controller. 

It was  recently when I was looking for a simple CORTEX controller to learn LibOpenCM3 that I  found the bluepill to be more suited. 

The Bluepill was very impressive in specs

  • STM32F103C6T based on ARM 32bit CORTEX M3 Core
  • 72Mhz max
  • 64/128k Flash
  • 20kb RAM
  • Basic peripherals ( ADC SPI I2C etc)
  • DMA - 7 Channels
  • Timers - 7
  • USB 2.0 (yes really)
  • JTAG/SWD debug ( just 4 wires to debug )
  • CAN 2.0
Detailed spec here

The board does not have any other special chip like Acclelrormeter Gyro etc. 
It does have a single LED conneted to one of the port pins. 

The board out of the box contains a simple Blinky Program what blinks the LED on giving 5V power.

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