The Nucleo F401 board arrived. I spent about two hours playing with it. So far I like it more than any other ST demo board.
I loaded the USB driver and the board appears as at least three devices.
Flash can be accessed as a 512 KB mass store device. I think this is mainly for flash programming by Mbed.
One of the Serial ports shows up as a COM port like Arduino.
An ST-link debug port can be used to load programs, set break points and observe RAM during execution.
Here is how I did my first blink program, very bare metal. I attached a .zip with the "project files". I used no fancy tools, just a .bat file to build the hex. Amazing how simple this was.
Download and installed Gnu Arm tools (gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_8-2014q1-20140314-win32.exe)
https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded
Download STM32Cube firmware for STM32 F4 and unzipped it in a folder named STM32CubeF4Root.
Download and installed ST-Link USB driver and ST-Link utility.
Use this Linux article as a guide to make a bare metal blink program on Windows 7.
http://regalis.com.pl/en/arm-cortex-stm32-gnulinux/
Built the hex file with a .bat file, build.bat.
Load the program with the ST-Link utility.
This is true bare metal. The attached zip file has all code for blink. Just three source files are compiled to .o files and linked. No other ST firmware files are linked.
The three source files are:
startup_stm32f401xe.s
system.c
main.c
blink.zip (11.2 KB)