STM32duino language reference, documentation in general

Seems like links from Arduino_STM32 leading to leaflabs.com are broken. We can use internet archive http://web.archive.org/web/201405161309 … guage.html but it is somehow cumbersome way to access documentation.
Could we make copy of the site here?

https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/Arduino_STM32

http://leaflabs.com/docs/language.html

****a little bit of ranting here, take it with grain of salt****
Honestly, I’m having hard time starting with STM32duino. Figuring out that “serial” is USB CDC serial device and “serial1” is first hardware port of STM32 was not trivial without documentation, which is not that plentiful nor organized. Generic Arduino documentation/examples are not much of use here. Then I found this https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/ … -Maple-API but it was mostly random shot.

Most of my knowledge about STM32duino I gathered from randomly reading the forum for a few days and source codes inspection. At the end I got into it, but it was helped by the fact I’m somehow familiar with embedded design. Beginners (who are expected users of Arduino) will not crawl through source codes to find out details.
****end of rant****

..I got into it, but it was helped by the fact I’m somehow familiar with embedded design. Beginners (who are expected users of Arduino) will not crawl through source codes to find out details.

It seems you are just the type of member we seek. Welcome!

jaromir wrote:Seems like links from here https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/Arduino_STM32 leading to here http://leaflabs.com/docs/language.html are broken. <…<

****a little bit of ranting here, take it with grain of salt****
Honestly, I’m having hard time starting with STM32duino. Figuring out that “serial” is USB CDC serial device and “serial1” is first hardware port of STM32 was not trivial without documentation, which is not that plentiful nor organized. Generic Arduino documentation/examples are not much of use here.
<…>
Most of my knowledge about STM32duino I gathered from randomly reading the forum for a few days and source codes inspection. At the end I got into it, but it was helped by the fact I’m somehow familiar with embedded design. Beginners (who are expected users of Arduino) will not crawl through source codes to find out details.
****end of rant****

@jaromir

Unfortunately the Leaflabs guys have been shutting down and re-organizing their Maple related sites for several months, and as its copyrighted material, we can’t simply copy it to a new location without their permission, and I’ve found it virtually impossible to get in touch with them (so I’ve given up trying)

The leaflabs forum was made read only a while ago, but their moderator was able to add a link to this site.

As there is no longer a commercial product (like the Maple mini) behind this community, there is only the community to write wikis and other doc’s, and I’ve found that no one has the time or inclination to do this.
Community members are usually (and quite rightly) focused on getting their individual projects to work, and post fixes or other information based on what they have found with their own project.

I have tried to liaise with the Arduino.cc team via the developers mailing list and also via the github repo for the IDE, however the IDE team are very focused on only supporting their commercial products e.g. the Uno, Due etc etc, and IMHO are not interested in supporting 3rd party cores.
The documentation on the 3rd party support (on GitHub) is very limited, and the IDE team do not give any warning to us when they will make a change which completely breaks our core.

So I’m afraid that it will be hard for some people to get into this space, and there is not a lot I can do to improve this, (apart from devoting even more unpaid time to this, which is currently impossible for me)

RogerClark wrote:<…>
So I’m afraid that it will be hard for some people to get into this space, and there is not a lot I can do to improve this, (apart from devoting even more unpaid time to this, which is currently impossible for me)

Well, a link to the FAQ-thread ( viewtopic.php?f=2&t=873 ) could be displayed more prominently. I don’t think it even is linked to at all in the repo’s README.md — how about making a “Getting started” header and moving the link to the Wiki under that, and adding a link to the FAQ in there, too? Might wanna pin the thread as a sticky, also. The USB-serial as Serial and USART as Serial1 – stuff that confused OP is mentioned in the FAQ, would probably have saved him some time if he’d just known to check it.

Another thing that comes to my mind is adding some better pinout-diagrams, at least for the most common boards. Even the Maple Mini – pinout diagram that’s floating around here is a bit lacking in the sense that it doesn’t clearly spell out which pins can do analog input, which ones have PWM and such — certainly useful for newcomers, at least? (I don’t know what software people use to make all the pretty pinout-diagrams. I have used Inkscape, but anything I make with it ends up being pretty crude and it’s just not a good fit for this stuff in the first place.)

FAQ has now been made into a “sticky” so its the first topic in the list.

I was hoping that other people would submit suggestions for the FAQ, but only 1 person (@ddrown) responded with additional FAQ’s, hence I presumed there was no interest in having an FAQ section.

I have fixed the broken link in the readme (and removed one link as I don’t think the information is still available on Leaflab’s site)

Actual PWM

Maple pinout and GPIO… Use link below,
select 4th entry “Maple” across top
Select “Docs”
See (right hand pane)

here.

RogerClark wrote:I was hoping that other people would submit suggestions for the FAQ, but only 1 person (@ddrown) responded with additional FAQ’s, hence I presumed there was no interest in having an FAQ section.

@warecatF

Thanks.

I think perhaps the best place for the diagrams would be the wiki on the github repo. However I’d need to add a new folder to store the images for the repo, as I don’t think the wiki’s on github have their own file storage tree.

A while ago, I had considered moving everything to the stm32duino account on github, which I setup a while ago, but again have limited time to make use of.

@jcw was very interested in helping the migration and tidying up etc, however I’ve not heard from him for months, so I guess he now has other priorities.

One other thing, that I think I’d like to do is to merge the GD32 into the STM32. In the end, there seem to be very little differences between the GD32F1 and the STM32F1. The GD32 is supposed to be pin compatible and can drop into any circuit which used a STM32, and as far as I can tell it is compatible with STM32 compiled binaries.

The only difference which caused me to put it into a different repo, was that some registers have additional features, – the main one being that the USB divider PLL has 4 options (2 bits) instead of 2 options (1 bit) on the STM32.
This allows the GD32 to be overclocked to 120Mhz and still have USB.

But I don’t have time to manually copy the changes in the STM32 folder into the GD32 folder, so if I get time, I’m just going to see if I can make the STM32 code handle 1 extra bit in one register (its a reserved bit in the STM32), and then I can unify the codebase and have the Generic GD32F103 as a variant in the STM32 folder (if thats not an oxymoron)

just wondering: how hard would it be to automaticallyreplace all links to the old location of the maple documentation/forums to correct links (either the new location, or the internet archive). It should be a straightforward replace to do (but don’t know how easy it is to achieve with the forum software)

@racemaniac

Which links do you mean.

Which pages are they on, and on what sites ?

RogerClark wrote:@racemaniac

Which links do you mean.

Which pages are they on, and on what sites ?

The complaint was one or two broken links in the readme in github, which I’ve now fixed, by removing one link which doesn’t exist and updating the other links.

However, the main complaint seems to be that it was hard for a newbie to find information, as its scattered thought the forum and in the Readme for the repo, and in the wiki for the repo, and there are also video’s on youtube and postings in other peoples blogs etc

And that all the information had not been pulled together into one well organized resource that people would find easy to use.

One specific complaint was that it was not clear that Serial was USB serial on devices that were uploaded via USB, and hence Serial1 is the first hardware serial channel.
But this is the standard adopted by Arduino themselves and used on the Leonardo and Arduino Pro Micro etc.

In terms of broken links, but I don’t think that was the major issue. If there are lots of broken links in the thousands of postings on the site, I don’t know how practical it is to find and update them.

I’m not aware of any simple way to do a global search and replace on text within all postings, but if there are broken links in postings, I doubt the same broken link would occur in more than 2 or 3 postings, its more likely that there are many different links that no longer work, hence using a global search and replace would not be applicable, or an effective way to fix this.

in no way am i advocating naughty, but how big is a zip of these ‘sites’?
well as it’s now ‘static’, i’ve a copy for my use alone and i suppose backup.

i was going to say a script to extract and also change links on the forum; oops
ok script to extract and then you figure out where said link should point to on your system.

is there a way to capture the link on the forum and transform it to use a local ‘site’?
of course there is, it’s a linux box after all. urgent find helmet.

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:in no way am i advocating naughty, but how big is a zip of these ‘sites’?
well as it’s now ‘static’, i’ve a copy for my use alone and i suppose backup.

i was going to say a script to extract and also change links on the forum; oops
ok script to extract and then you figure out where said link should point to on your system.

is there a way to capture the link on the forum and transform it to use a local ‘site’?
of course there is, it’s a linux box after all. urgent find helmet.

stephen

All this effort seems pointless unless you know there is a big problem.

And even after you make the whole site into static, there is no way to reverse the process.

I think people are missing the larger point made by the OP, and are focussing on irrelevant minor issues like a few broken links.

RogerClark wrote:All this effort seems pointless unless you know there is a big problem.

And even after you make the whole site into static, there is no way to reverse the process.

I think people are missing the larger point made by the OP, and are focussing on irrelevant minor issues like a few broken links.

Just imagine when some older members (me included) were all posting in the same spaghetti single thread in arduino.cc forum …

martinayotte wrote:Just imagine when some older members (me included) were all posting in the same spaghetti single thread in arduino.cc forum …

racemaniac wrote:
<…>
and it’s a shame how much information is still locked in that huge thread :s

mrburnette wrote:racemaniac wrote:
<…>
and it’s a shame how much information is still locked in that huge thread :s

racemaniac wrote:
<…>
more of an assumption, but i’ve seen the thread get referred to on this forum as the answer to some questions.