Bluepill price

My last eBay buy was about 5 for ~$10 w/free shipping. I don’t see the free shipping deal any longer but its now around $11 inc the shipping,

Sifting around on Taobao (the guys that make the board). I found an outstanding price of $1.27 ea(!)

https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a2 … t=8#detail

Of course, who knows if it will ship outside of CHN or if its the right flash size etc.

Still…. if its true… $1.27 my goodness…

I am not sure if folks realize just how much is inside these inexpensive chips. There is a ton of functionality waiting to be used!

…so many bluepills are produced… and the wrong USB resistor is still here….

Cheapest bluepill on ebay currently seems to be £1.50

I’d be hard pressed to get a decent cup of coffee for that.

@slammer, you are right, it would be nice if someone gave them a nudge and got them to put the correct USB resistor on, its not as if it would make any difference to the price.

I am not sure if folks realize just how much is inside these inexpensive chips. There is a ton of functionality waiting to be used!

They know. And they do not care – it is all about profit per 10K units and how quicky they can sell those 10K units. This continues until the market saturates and demand dries up. As there are various sources for these boards, even after one manufacturer drops out of the race, the remaining demand gets redistributed and the games go on a while longer.

This pattern has been repeated time and time again with Asian manufacturers. Consider the UNO clones, the mini-328, etc. Or, just look at the ESP8266 and now the ESP32 dev boards are under $5 USD.

A quick search of AliExpress is showing that the mini-328P are $2.42 and actually going up in price from 9 months ago when I could buy them for under $2.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-US … 22987.html

Will the STM32 boards come down further, or will they start to go up? My crystal ball needs new batteries, but many things other than demand may affect future prices: we see that often with the price of crude oil. Add to that trade wars and tariffs and retaliation and pricing is guarantee to be shaky.

I would not buy a 1000 units just for myself, but my buying habits is to buy more than 1 at a time, maybe 3 to 5. At $2 and under, even if the price does drop, your “lost” will be very minimum and you will have the extra in your parts box instantly available for that next project.

Ray

Purely by coincidence, the clamp to allow me to read 8 pin SOIC/SOT devices also costs about £1.50

Price is pretty much arbitrary, and often has little to do with functionality.

The mythical “market forces” of the blind faith capitalist religion have far more to do with the chaos in the system, than they have to do with rational decision making on the part of the consumer.

Just don’t tell the capitalist true believers I said that, or they will be camped outside my door with their corporate sponsored pitch forks before you can say “things go better with coke”

Cheapest blue pill (Acelex) on aliexpress is $1.70 /piece, == €1.40 incl. shipping.

My question is, “Who are the millions of people that are buying them”? They seem to be ubiquitous in all the online marketplaces, yet don’t seem to have so many reports of projects and tutorials and so on, that you see for the Arduino. With those prices and placement you can safely assume that they are selling in large numbers. I guess I could pose this as, “Where is the Blue Pill movement”? Is there something in China that we’re not aware of, like institutional use?

[electrobling – Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:10 pm] –
… “Where is the Blue Pill movement”? Is there something in China that we’re not aware of, like institutional use?

My guess is the demand is far less than millions; perhaps in the high tens of thousands total. I just searched AliExpress for STM32F103C8T6 development board and I took the first five (5) results and looked at their inventory numbers:
389,
137,
3627,
60340, &
304.
Based upon these available inventory, I suspect what is happening is that the largest dealer (60K+) is brokering for the smaller dealers (< 1K). When viewed in this context, the numbers are not so overwhelming. Then I looked at the sales figures from the same five (5) dealers:
357,
2002,
447,
971, &
566.
IMO, 971 “sold” units does not justify an inventory of 60K+, so something else is going on… the store has been open for 24 months, so either they did a really poor job in anticipating demand or they are brokering for others.

I got tired of ordering two and three at a time and when the price fell under $2, I ordered 2 lots of 10 each. Yes, I paid a bit too much, but I got these puppies shipped in a nice, strong cardboard box and not some bubble-pack. I got free air express shipping and the order was delivered in under 7 days.
So, a few dimes extra per board works out to around $5, but they are here in my parts drawer for instant access. Sometimes I feel we worry a bit too much about a few cents saving for hobby use.

Ray

Ray, I think Aliexpress is only for some extra bucks. Everything beyond 100 pieces -> alibaba
Do you need 100000 pieces per week?
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/ … 91560.html

[madias – Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:50 pm] –
Ray, I think Aliexpress is only for some extra bucks. Everything beyond 100 pieces -> alibaba
Do you need 100000 pieces per week?
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/ … 91560.html

Agreed. But few of us are in a position to purchase from Alibaba and this source gives us no indication of what volume is being consumed. So, if a U.S. company wanted to produce a controller board for a project, they would likely use a Chinese board manufacturer and the U.S. agent would be working through Alibaba to supply the chips and other components in SMT reels for the pick n place operation.

Additionally, I would assume that Alibaba drives inventory into AliExpress. My point is that it is likely that AliExpress sellers would pool their resources and buy in bulk with the bulk distributed to the sub-buyers as required.

My numerical analysis was to show that the AliExpress dealers were not dealing in millions of units.

Ray

Maybe the Aliexpress dealers are the poorly paid workers from the major factories selling the overproduction of them

[madias – Tue Mar 20, 2018 3:32 pm] –
Maybe the Aliexpress dealers are the poorly paid workers from the major factories selling the overproduction of them

Perhaps.
Or, perhaps they work that “ghost” shift and do their own manufacturing off-the-books.
Or, maybe China is “quietly demanding” that big export orders also have some internal “scrap” to support the small dealers.

Normal economics as taught in the American classrooms in the late 1970 and 1980 simply do not prepare one to interpret how the Chinese economy works today… it certainly is perplexing.

I would also think that the current model is unstable, which is why I have stocked my little lab with items that I think I will use over the next few years of playing around as a hobby. A few tens of dollars to buy resistors, capacitors, USB-serial modules, LEDs, cheap SPI and I2C OLED, DC-DC buck and boost, and a few blue boards, a few Maple Mini, a few ESP8266, a few ESP32, various sensors, etc. Not much money for the flexibility to tinker and enjoy myself in my retirement years. I will not live forever, so I am making the best of the China import of electronics. With the current political situation, just one tweak could totally wreck havoc on the import of these small parts… like dude, what if shipping was not heavily subsidized? Remember the days when you needed a 1 dollar part and the shipping was $10 dollars? Oh, it is still that way from Adafruit and others in the domestic shipping business.

Ray

I am not a professional , just an hobbyist but I totally agree with you Ray.
I believe that the Arduino phenomena started a new era not because it was the best board but because it was born at the right time with the right starting price.

[zoomx – Thu Mar 22, 2018 9:46 am] –
I am not a professional , just an hobbyist but I totally agree with you Ray.
I believe that the Arduino phenomena started a new era not because it was the best board but because it was born at the right time with the right starting price.

… and such is how a “movement” starts; mostly being in the right place at the right time with the right product at the right price. The concept of “open source”, built by an Academic professional and accompanied by a non-traditional IDE with a simple user language and a very powerful compiler/linker, also open source. The “artistic” focus of the original Arduino project also meant building a following of traditional non-programmers and canned-code (libraries) to make it easy for a non-EE and non-technical student to utilize the device with sensors. I do not think that the world knew that it needed Arduino, rather Arduino came and secured a following of people world-wide… One of my favorite jokes is about the VP of Marketing for a fictitious company running through the engineering department shouting, “We have a new slogan, we need a product!”

Ray

Maple Board was born around 2010-2011 by Leaflabs, but from my point of view, was “too much, too early….”
Arduino world was dominated by avr only boards, even the first official non-avr arduino, the Due, was not ready.
I was an early adopter of the new board, but too many problems made me to abandon the effort. In that time I was working mainly as MCU embedded developer using mainly the ATMEGA128, but I was thinking that ARMs will dominate the embedded market (the release of LPC1111 from NXP for 1$ was just the beginning). The main problem was the tools!!!! Compilers and debuggers were too expensive (about $3000) and the free alternatives like GCC were not reliable and effective.
Arduino these days was more a toy than a development board and for this reason there was no need for better, bigger and faster boards (the arduino mega was OK for bigger applications).
Many times in the history of technology the right timing is very critical, “too early” has the same result with the “too late”…..

I have no numbers but I believe that BluePill is becoming the most used after the Atmega328 group mainly because it’s price and maybe this forum and Roger, at last, who started it.

Blue Pill is indeed very cheap, and can be used with many different ways, stm32duino is one of them.
– can be used as educational tool for ARM development using typical bare metal approach. Most universities around the world are teaching ARM development and programming as main course about MCU systems, many of them are using STM32 as reference platform.
– can be used by makers and hobbyists as a cheap and easy arduino upgrade (here we are… )
– can be used with other frameworks like mbed or chibbyOS for development and prototyping.
– can be used as blackmagic probe or even as stlink
– can be used for everything that requires a MCU. It is very important that with STM32 and the bluepill you are always ready to jump to a larger MCU very easily, there is almost no limit for how far you can go.
I don’t expect a company to use Blue pills directly in their products as the use of bare chips with a few components is very easy to implement.
From the other side the competition of MCUs is very hard today, with 4$ you can buy the excellent ESP32, I don’t think that our poor STM32F103 can compete with ESP32 that costs $2 more. I think that after avr based arduinos, the ESP8266/ESP32 are very strong and active.

[Slammer – Thu Mar 22, 2018 3:50 pm] –
…
I don’t think that our poor STM32F103 can compete with ESP32 that costs $2 more. I think that after avr based arduinos, the ESP8266/ESP32 are very strong and active.

Completely different usage category, featherweight boxing class vs heavyweight class. I have a number of ESP32 here and they compare more closely to the Raspberry Pi Zero-W… biggest difference in programming is that ESP32 under Arduino has FreeRTOS managing 2 cpu cores and the 500K of SRAM where the RPi_ZW uses Linux. I can easily write C++ and run on Raspbian with near realtime behavior but the running environment resembles a PC where the ESP32 running environment is lean & mean.

What I think is very interesting is that the ESP32 Arduino core port is an Espressif official port. I see the same happening with the STM Nucleo official boards and the STM32DUINO core port.https://github.com/stm32duino that is CubeMX based. Moving the support model into the company-supported space says lots about how a company views the Arduino developers. Think about this for a moment… The chip companies are viewing “duino” development as a ligimate area for creating longterm interest and support which will drive unit sales in actual silicon later on.
“duino-dudes” and “duino-dudettes” should congratulate ourselves as collectively we are being taken seriously. We are just beginning to see members jump from Arduino to Eclipse or other professional environments. I have noticed more interest in BMP for debugging and more interest in STLink. What does this mean? Hobbyists are growing up as their project complexities become more demanding… some projects may jump to crowd-funding and on to commercial enterprises.

Added:
From a commercial point-of-view, I think the biggest issue with Arduino programming in the commercial space is the 3rd party libraries. Most hobbyists refuse to create their own libraries from scratch and each 3rd party library is licensed but not always in the same manner. Just to get a feel for how dialog between you and a 3rd party license owner could go, see: https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=46554
Now, there is no doubt that Arduino would not be Arduino’ish if not for the 3rd party libraries. However, in my mind, this is the number one (#1) serious issue with taking something to market and owning all rights. Half of the stuff in most libraries is unused. If you have the ability, build your own directly used functions and avoid libraries. If you must use 3rd party libraries, be certain that you select one that allows you to utilize the source and redistribute the binary(ies) without restriction and without republishing.

Added:
I find this very interesting as the current statement from STM on their github page for the Arduino core files:
Next release
STM32F1

• BluePill F103C8 (Basic support, no USB)
• MapleMini F103CB (Basic support, no USB)

I can understand not supporting USB on the Blue Pill due to the assembly defect with the USB resistor. But the Baite Maple Mini is selected primarily over the BP because of the USB connectivity. It is a mute argument because STLink can easily overcome the annoyance of not having USB but then it is really nice to have the simple, single USB mini cable to activate the Arduino console screen … eliminates all of the external electronics until the cable ties to the MM.

I love the Official Nucleo Boards, but:
STMicroelectronics
EVALUATION BOARD LICENSE AGREEMENT
By using this evaluation board or kit (together with all related software, firmware, components, and documentation provided
by ST, “Evaluation Board”), You (“You”) are agreeing to be bound by the terms and conditions of this Evaluation Board License
Agreement (“Agreement”). Do not use the Evaluation Board until You have read and agreed to this Agreement. Your use of
the Evaluation Board constitutes Your acceptance of this Agreement.
LICENSE
STMicroelectronics (“ST”) grants You the right to use the enclosed Evaluation Board offering limited features only to evaluate
and test ST products solely for Your evaluation and testing purposes in a research and development setting. The Evaluation
Board shall not be, in any case, directly or indirectly assembled as a part in any production of Yours as it is solely developed
to serve evaluation purposes and has no direct function and is not a finished product. If software and/or firmware is
accompanied by Full text, PDF Here.
Probably explains why folks with limited commercial needs (< 100 units) are looking to Black board and Blue board. Over 100 units, I suspect a good case can be made for custom boards and paying for pick-n-place/reflow assembly. Contemplating such things make my old brain swell and give me a terrible headache!

Ray

That’s one of the mystery affair of all those extremely low price things on taobao. I live in China and I also do not have any ideas of how they sells these for profits.
I think this is the age, with the help of online shop/open source/community, the cost is so low that, everyone can grab enough resources to be a maker.

[WindyYam – Fri Mar 23, 2018 8:04 am] –
That’s one of the mystery affair of all those extremely low price things on taobao. I live in China and I also do not have any ideas of how they sells these for profits.
I think this is the age, with the help of online shop/open source/community, the cost is so low that, everyone can grab enough resources to be a maker.

Is this perhaps because they are in a “special economic zone”, and have tax rebaits from government, and special deals with China Post?

That’s one of the mystery affair of all those extremely low price things on taobao.

I suspect that those chips come from production scraps: someone was making a run for 10K something, so they ordered 11K chips just in case. At the end of the production, they are left with some spares and sold them for pennies.

or their production is cut to 8K so 2K chips go for a song….

for someone willing to make a buck, that’s still a good business to be in.

There would need to be at least one 0 missing off the end of your numbers. I have used about 20 of these just for my testing. There must be 10s if not 100s of 1000s of these that have been sold already at these very low prices.

More likely, these might not be original processors. This could explain why they have 128K of flash instead of 64K they are supposed to have.

[RogerClark – Mon Mar 26, 2018 8:35 pm] –

[WindyYam – Fri Mar 23, 2018 8:04 am] –
That’s one of the mystery affair of all those extremely low price things on taobao. I live in China and I also do not have any ideas of how they sells these for profits.
I think this is the age, with the help of online shop/open source/community, the cost is so low that, everyone can grab enough resources to be a maker.

Is this perhaps because they are in a “special economic zone”, and have tax rebaits from government, and special deals with China Post?

On taobao there are likely 40+ of shops that sell bluepills . I dont think they have any kinds of “tax rebaits from government” since on taobao the “cost” to open a shop is cheap. Some bigger shop have deal with express company others not. They may share some common vendors on these boards. I think the only reason they sell these for this price is because…It’s just for show, people can easily find their shop, and buy the cheap boards(in quantities of less than 5) and always plus something else.

[dannyf – Mon Mar 26, 2018 10:01 pm] –
That’s one of the mystery affair of all those extremely low price things on taobao.

I suspect that those chips come from production scraps: someone was making a run for 10K something, so they ordered 11K chips just in case. At the end of the production, they are left with some spares and sold them for pennies.

or their production is cut to 8K so 2K chips go for a song….

for someone willing to make a buck, that’s still a good business to be in.

But it lasts for years…2 years ago blue pill boards have cost me 15 yuan (usd 2.4) each and I’m feel happy, now I search on taobao and quickly find one that costs 7.49 yuan(usd 1.2), although only for the first piece. So this situation is not by accident, and they might be even cheaper tomorrow, since everything on taobao(those nrf24s arduinomini clones mpu9250s etc) are cheaper than 2 years ago
You’ll buy that board, but in quantities they will grow to 9.99 yuan each. although still very cheap. So, for me I always buy something else plus a bluepill

[RogerClark – Mon Mar 26, 2018 8:35 pm] –

[WindyYam – Fri Mar 23, 2018 8:04 am] –
That’s one of the mystery affair of all those extremely low price things on taobao. I live in China and I also do not have any ideas of how they sells these for profits.
I think this is the age, with the help of online shop/open source/community, the cost is so low that, everyone can grab enough resources to be a maker.

Is this perhaps because they are in a “special economic zone”, and have tax rebaits from government, and special deals with China Post?

It’s not, my friend, don’t make it complicated.

It’s simple.

Because of competition from China MCU companies ( *1 at the end of 2017, about 1380 China IC design companies, More than 100 from 4bits to 64bits MCUs companies like Gigadevice ). They give a standard of the price in China.

ST, MicroChip and TI, don’t wanna loss China market where is over 60% elec-products of the world be made in. The world factory.

A example: do you know HK32F series MCUs ? It’s only a small company in Shenzhen China.

*1 weblink: http://www.eefocus.com/mcu-dsp/397934 // in Chinese

Only a simple price strategy in business. That is why you can buy the STM32s and PIC in China more cheaper than other countries.

If there are so many local MCU manufacturing companies and 60% world market-share in your country. you can get the low price too. maybe more less but it’s really a large sum to got ARM license and pay to IC design team.

BTW: Gigadevice and other China cortex-M MCU companies are not good in business. More and more players come in. HUAWEI, MI, ALLWINNER, RockChip ,C-SKY , Espressif , MXCHIP etc companies. and Cortex A, R , Single-Core , Multi-Cores. even all-in-1 chips.

ARM will set a office in Shenzhen China. ARM is a biggest winner!

It is BUSINESS ! JUST BUSINESS! and It is THE SECRET of TAOBAO.

[csnol – Wed Mar 28, 2018 5:58 pm] –

[RogerClark – Mon Mar 26, 2018 8:35 pm] –

[WindyYam – Fri Mar 23, 2018 8:04 am] –
That’s one of the mystery affair of all those extremely low price things on taobao. I live in China and I also do not have any ideas of how they sells these for profits.
I think this is the age, with the help of online shop/open source/community, the cost is so low that, everyone can grab enough resources to be a maker.

Is this perhaps because they are in a “special economic zone”, and have tax rebaits from government, and special deals with China Post?

It’s not, my friend, don’t make it complicated.

It’s simple.

Because of competition from China MCU companies ( *1 at the end of 2017, about 1380 China IC design companies, More than 100 from 4bits to 64bits MCUs companies like Gigadevice ). They give a standard of the price in China.

ST, MicroChip and TI, don’t wanna loss China market where is over 60% elec-products of the world be made in. The world factory.

A example: do you know HK32F series MCUs ? It’s only a small company in Shenzhen China.

*1 weblink: http://www.eefocus.com/mcu-dsp/397934 // in Chinese

Only a simple price strategy in business. That is why you can buy the STM32s and PIC in China more cheaper than other countries.

If there are so many local MCU manufacturing companies and 60% world market-share in your country. you can get the low price too. maybe more less but it’s really a large sum to got ARM license and pay to IC design team.

BTW: Gigadevice and other China cortex-M MCU companies are not good in business. More and more players come in. HUAWEI, MI, ALLWINNER, RockChip ,C-SKY , Espressif , MXCHIP etc companies. and Cortex A, R , Single-Core , Multi-Cores. even all-in-1 chips.

ARM will set a office in Shenzhen China. ARM is a biggest winner!

It is BUSINESS ! JUST BUSINESS! and It is THE SECRET of TAOBAO.

i agree this is a competition, but still the price on taobao could hardly make any profit and the bluepills are not really sell in 1000000+ . I think most of the users would be students/makers/hobbist/geek that dont make big deal to support that price, and nerd like me that used to collect cheap boards

So I suspect you are chinese too? I live in shenzhen

Hi, @WindyYam

Yes, I am.

But you’re wrong, my compatriot. It’s a HUGE Industrial Supply System. Maybe you are really not a business guy.
It is difficult to explain detailed in English for me.
Don’t care it. Just enjoy in the heaven of DIYers —> China. and you living in the Heaven of the Heaven —> Shenzhen! Wonderful city!

The devil’s law in a Chinese words: “侃价 – 要照着1/3侃！” , It is a life-skill from the business means “Channel price <= 1/3 ending price”

It seems that only some specific STM32 parts are aggressively priced in China. For example, STM32F030F4P6, STM32F103C8T6, STM32F407VET6 are some examples of this policy, priced almost at half of retail price. Other MCUs have almost the same price (at least from ebay/aliexpress).

If you can check out the pricing of 32febk.

If China’s export can be explained by its subsidies or fx actions, or sneaky negotiations, you have to ask yourself then why our governments were not smart enough to replicate such actions, and why we were not smart enough to elect government officials to do what China supposedly did.

At some point, we have to look into the mirror and ask ourselves why we lost that drive that made us great. Blaming others for our failures isn’t going to make us great again.

With the escalation of the US-China trade war it may happen the silicon/know-how will stop flow easily into China..

Only if we cut China off the internet, and carry out a complete embargo.

That also means losing access to a huge mkt. It wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out a large portion of the trade deficit with China is done by western firms who manufacture in China for its cheap labor and re-export from China.

Globalization always favors people with capital, either financial or human capital. Workers benefit in the short term (as consumers of cheap imports) and suffer over the long term (via job losses and lower living standards).

Western firms who manufacture in China and re-export from China do actually a transfer of a significant know-how into China per se. Thus the intention of US might be to move the manufacture back to US.. And the next logical step would be to start with high-tech embargo – ie. western firms will not be allowed to manufacture items in China (or elsewhere) where US patents or special know-how could be infringed..

And the next logical step would be to start with high-tech embargo

that is really the goal. the trade war is aimed not at balancing the trade in the near term but the dominance for the next couple hundred years. if china dominates in the next generation of high tech: alternative energy, electric vehicle, semiconductors, transportation, AI, …, areas identified in “Made in China 2025”, the next century will be China’s.

an embargo of goods isn’t going to be nearly sufficient. and you will see massive pains on both sides. the key question would be who can sustain that longer.

in our case, are you willing to pay $20 bluepills? or triple prices to have your PCB made? or $2K for your iPhone? …

The interesting part of all of this is that the majority of the things we use day to day that are mass produced, require knowledge to produce that is instantly portable. In other words if I want to produce a clone of a device, or even a clone of a medicine, modern technology allows for the production of that device pretty much anywhere on the planet. Even what were once highly specialised industrial processes can now be replicated relatively easily pretty much anywhere.

The people who will dominate the future are the ones who innovate, and for that you require a highly educated population. This is perhaps the one thing that the so called developed world has forgotten. China, India, Brazil and even Russia have a large number of skilled engineers as well as large number of highly educated individuals who are perfectly capable of building, managing and administering the industries of the future. India for example has been described as having the largest middle class of any country on earth.

If you indulge in 19th century ideas like protectionism, you ignore the realities of the 21st century, and you do so at your peril. China with a population, and thus an internal market of around 1.4Bn and a daily birth rate of around 45,000 requires the trade of the USA and the West, far less than you might imagine.

For example, the internal market for smart phones for 2017-2018 in China at around 625 million is roughly 1/3 of the 1.86bn total smart phones sold world wide.

The people who will dominate the future are the ones who innovate, and for that you require a highly educated population.

absolutely true. I think western civilization has forgotten what made them great in the first place. and I don’t know if we will ever recover from that.

in a democracy, it is difficult to go to the voters and deliver a tough message.

[Pito – Thu Apr 05, 2018 5:09 pm] –
With the escalation of the US-China trade war it may happen the silicon/know-how will stop flow easily into China..

.. except China already has that know how.

Furthermore many companies like for example Arm, a notionally British company are controlled by foreign capital, in this case Softbank, who also own BostonDynamics. To assume that know how is going to be somehow turned off at national borders, ignores the realities of the modern world.

China will simply buy whatever know how it requires, either through legitimate channels or by stealth.

Furthermore, don’t make the mistake of assuming that captialism and democracy are in any way related. Captalism is an entirely different animal altogether, and one that the Chinese are very familiar with.

I noticed part of the complaints of companies who want to do business in China is that they are required to hand over all their designs and know-how to their Chinese “partner” company, before they are allowed to do business.

IMHO any company that shares all their designs to another company, be it to another company in the same country or one in China etc, should not be surprised when the other company starts making products that are very similar to their products.

The same thing has been going on for years, with companies head hunting developers or other experts, so that they can use the know-how that these people naturally have by working on a cutting edge project for a number of years.

They don’t need to infringe on any patents or copyrights to produce a product that does the same job. They just need a deep understanding of the technology etc
In fact given a clean slate, most people can develop a better product than they did last time, and often will do things differently with the benefit of hindsight.

Market access is a tough topic. Obviously if you are a wto member, you should respect your obligations under wto and open up your market.

But there are lots of exceptions to wto rules, like national security, gmo foods, comma equipments, …

On the flip side companies do have the right to decide for themselves if they want to trade technology for access. If they have signed on the dotted line, it would be hypocritical for them to cry now.

i Don’t know how this is handled by the WTO, but different countries have completely different copyright, trademark and patent laws.

And even within the USA, there is a huge amount of copyright infringement, which generally goes unchecked.
YouTube seems to be full of unlicensed content.

I know designers where their artwork is constantly being pirated and used on clothing, facilitated by sites in the USA.
they have to play whack-a-mole all the time, sending out takedown notices, to very little effect, as the clothing on deman sites, do not keep a registry of designs that have been proven to be unlicensed.

These sites also sell unlicensed artwork on clothing and all sorts of unlicensed merchandise e.g Cups, baseball caps etc, from major corporations like Disney as well.

The other thing that I see people complaining about, is when they put their designs in the public domain and cheap copies of the hardware gets made ( mainly in China), but they seem unhappy about this.

I think this partially is because the copies are often cheaply made so that hardware doesn’t work as well as it should, and people complain to the designer.
But the easy response if just to say they don’t support the cheaply made hardware.

In some cases I have seen people put designs on GitHub with a licsense that says not for commercial use.

But cheap copies are still made, however with slight modifications, so that they could have been made from scratch, based on the idea of the original design.
E.g. a lot of work on PCB design is component layout an orientation on a PCB, and its much quicker to make a product if you have the original PCB design to look at, including the design files in KiCAD.

One thing I find odd is that I never hear of car manufacturers complaining that their competitors put a copycat feature into their cars.
E.g. one manufacturer puts heated seats into their cars, and the next year their competitor has the same thing.

Or perhaps they all patent these ideas and cross licsense them to each other ??

There never seem to be big ongoing court battles about folding wing mirrors or central locking or self closing hatchback doors.

people put designs on GitHub with a licsense that says not for commercial use.

very easy to circumvent,

it is crazy that so many people think a piece of paper can protect them.

Easy to circumvent, plus, the big money is in the battles between the big corpa’s over copyright (Samsung vs Apple etc).

My understanding is that generally in the case of designs released on the internet, infringements don’t make enough money individually to make it worth pursuing, and this is what the infringing enterprise is relying on.

Simply put if I make a couple of dozen copies of your product, you can sue me for the money you have potentially lost, i.e. half a dozen sales, which probably isn’t worth the effort. If I copy your design and make half a million copies, then assuming the lawyers don’t eat all the money, that infringement might be worth chasing. Its always a balancing act.

However there is a risk in not suing too, in the sense that your product might end up “genericized”, i.e. so many cloners make it that you can no longer expect to catch them all, so your wonderwidget ends up just one of many wonderwidgets.

If you are interested in the legal side of things, you might find this guy worth watching -> https://www.youtube.com/user/ljfrench009/videos

That $1.27 Taobao price is elusive unless you have a Chinese bank account. I was not able to get to a page where a western CC could work. My wife was helping as she is from mainland China so there was no issue with translation problems. Still I was able to get $1.76 from Aliexpress but the shipping of $2.99 kinda kills the unit price.

BTW… did you know you can trace a Bluepill? Instruction Trace Module (ITM)

My example is in Ada but the author that inspired my port has a C code example.

http://www.hrrzi.com/2018/04/tracing-bluepill_21.html

$1.82, free shipping on AliExpress:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/sku/32667361243.html

You can get it @ $1.50 with free shipping if you use the AliExpress phone app.

I always find these kinds of discussion funny… If the bluepills were to somehow double or triple in price, would it really be relevant to -any- hobbyist?

When you’re dealing with a dollar or two for any given hobby project, other than some sense of finding a “bargain”, it has zero bearing on your ability to proceed, or any “lifestyle” impact the (trivial) cost might have.

Bluepills are attractive due to the ludicrously low price relative to capability, but all things considered, for STM32 deveopment, a Leaf Labs Maple Mini clone is probably a smarter choice. A trivial dollar or two more gets you a more capable board, which is easier to use right out of the box.

See: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/173017731924 (cheaper ones may exist elsewhere…)

@STMdude you are absolutely correct…. for hobby use the 1-2$ difference is not important… Actually I think that the best value board is the Nucleo L476… except if you need a lot of boards for your application.

I agree 100%. I would choose a development board for development convenience and not price.
e.g. NUCLEO-F103 if you want to use the elderly F103 as the final target.
e.g. NUCLEO-L476 if you want to use most Cortex-M4 as the final target.

NUCLEO boards are very convenient for attaching Arduino Shields and Du-Pont wires
Onboard Serial. Onboard ST-LINK. Debug your Arduino programs in Keil, Rowley, …

Yes, you will consider price, size and form factor for the eventual target.

It is generally easier to develop on the biggest chip from a family. Then do final build and test on the smallest, cheapest member target.

David.

this seems also a good deal.

Cheers, E.

Many times, low prices make us to buy things that are not very usefull….
I bought for example, some STM32F030 boards for 1.20$, not because I want to use them, but because of price…. but!!! If I sum all that money that I have spent in such things, the total amount is not at all small.

For Nucleo boards, I have a collection with F103, F401, F411 and L476 and I think that I can take most of the power of STMs, I am thinking also the L152 but I am not sure if I want to play with L1’s, I think that for modern designs L4 series is the way to go. Maybe for something bigger F746 is also OK.

Summing the last comments up with my additionals:
F103 Nucleo: Nice, but no USB connector (only on ST-Link V2.1), big drawback: No silicion print for the pins beyond the “arduino headers” this is totally nasty.
Maple mini vs Bluepill: I also like the mini more, but for RTC the bluepill has the OSC on board.
For development boards I prefer those Chinese boards with additional and useful “goodies” like W25Qxx, SD-Card slot, battery holder, their are also “unbeatable” in pricing, like:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-sh … 84907.html (got it for less – about 8 Euros)
Also handy if you need I2S:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/STM32F1 … 12996.html

I agree, Nucleo F103 is not very usefull as a Blue Pill with ST-Link Clone is the absolutely minimum, in terms of cost, to start with STM32…

[Slammer – Sat May 05, 2018 2:06 pm] –
I agree, Nucleo F103 is not very usefull as a Blue Pill with ST-Link Clone is the absolutely minimum, in terms of cost, to start with STM32…

…but with any Nucleo you have got a “real” ST-Link V2.1
So at best:
1 pcs Nucleo
some bluepills
some minis
optional: A decent dev board and
1-2 ST-Link V2 clones
Should be affordable for every student.

For totally minimum:
A maple mini clone (because of the already flashed bootloader you can update)

Yes! It is better to buy other Nucleo than F103, the L476 or F401/411 is a very good option

[madias – Sat May 05, 2018 6:20 pm] –
…but with any Nucleo you have got a “real” ST-Link V2.1

It’s worth pointing out that you can use the ST-Link part of the Nucleo (and Discovery) boards with external devices too – so you don’t necessarily need the ST-Link clones.

[dave j – Sat May 05, 2018 8:13 pm] –

[madias – Sat May 05, 2018 6:20 pm] –
…but with any Nucleo you have got a “real” ST-Link V2.1

It’s worth pointing out that you can use the ST-Link part of the Nucleo (and Discovery) boards with external devices too – so you don’t necessarily need the ST-Link clones.

That’s what I meant. You can also break (officially!) the ST-Link unit from the main board. So you got one external ST-Link and one (not so usefully) dev board.

Another ultra low priced solution is to buy two BluePills, convert one to Blackmagic probe and use the other for development…
Anyway there are many low cost solutions nowadays.
As talking about pricing, I cant see very low prices in Chinese market to other STM32 chips except specific parts like F103 and some others….

The Black Pill by RobotDyn is possibly the best “Pill” board to buy at the moment, depending on what they are currently charging for it. ( pricing seems to vary )

They fixed the BP issue with the USB pull-up.

You can also buy it with the bootloader pre installed, but they double the price in this case, so I wonder how many people buy that version.

BTW. I used to recommend the MapleMini (clones) but as they dont have a 5V output or RTC oscillator, or STLink header, I now generally use the Blue Pill or the RobotDyn board

Also STLink clones are dirt cheap so there is no excuse not to buy one of those as well

The black pill looks good too. I do like the BP pinout. Also, you can pop in a new cpu. I did another swap today, I now have 2 bluepill+’s as I call them. An stm32l443cc for the stm32f103c8 (pin compatible).

http://www.hrrzi.com/2018/02/the-bluepill.html

I know some other people have experimented with swapping the F103 for a more powerful chip, and generally had success with that.

There is a “community” F4 pill board being developed, but I think everyone has run out of spare time after receiving the first batch of PCB’s.

Eventually it would be good if one of the manufacturers in China picked it up and mass produced it, but in the mean time the BluePill or BlackPill etc make good donors.

[morbos – Mon May 07, 2018 7:10 am] –
The black pill looks good too.

There is even a version with four mounting holes available on Ebay.

[electrobling – Tue May 08, 2018 3:24 pm] –

[morbos – Mon May 07, 2018 7:10 am] –
The black pill looks good too.

There is even a version with four mounting holes available on Ebay.

Interesting..

Can you post a link

A black pill with mounting holes:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/STM32F103C8T6-M … 1849363080

The mounting holes in this black pill board are reducing the number of available I/O pins. In many applications, this is a significant restriction.

[Ollie – Wed May 16, 2018 4:13 am] –
The mounting holes in this black pill board are reducing the number of available I/O pins. In many applications, this is a significant restriction.

Agreed…
That’s not so good

meh, depends on what you need it for. For some project the mountholes & less pins may make sense, but it’s indeed a less universal board than the regular bluepill

The pin reductions were chosen judiciously. Missing are 5V, C14, C15 and VB. If you’re not battery backing up the LSE, the only serious loss would be 5V. C14 and C15 shouldn’t be used for any high speed I/O anyway, because they’re loaded by the RTC circuit. Also if you drive them with I/O you probably exceed the drive level of the RTC crystal and pooch it. It’s been a mystery to me why they are brought out to pins at all. But for me, 5V and VB are a serious omission.

For using it as Blackmagic probe is OK, I like the mounting holes. The 5V omission is very serious, because for using it you have to power it only from USB or directly to 3V ( loading the regulator only from the output is not recommended). It is funny that there is a diode from Vusb to 5V, but 5V goes only to the regulator….

I agree.
Loss of the 5V pin is a big problem for most people.

Lack of 5v pin is the main reason I no longer use the Maple Mini

Is the 5V power-in or power-out? I can see having a 5V power-out being useful for some projects. But for power-in, the only 5V sources I regularly use are USB chargers or USB ports. If I wanted to power from a battery pack, I would just run a USB cable from the pack, though the USB plug would take up extra space.

On the other hand, the screw holes make solid mounting in a 3D-printed case really easy.

Tastes and needs differ.

[arpruss – Thu May 17, 2018 3:22 am] –
Is the 5V power-in or power-out?

On the BP, you decide. 5V pin is connected directly to USB Vbus. If you mean, “what would you use a 5V input pin for?” I would say it is much easier to connect a non-USB power source to a pin than a USB port. The regulator input can’t exceed 5.5V so it’s not like an Arduino that can run on 9V or 12V. If you have multiple boards in a system it might be useful to tap the 5V from another board so they can all run from the same USB power source.

Its the 5V out from USB which is different on the BP from the MM

The MM has a Vin pin, which goes though a diode to the USB 5V, but because there is a diode, you can’t use it as a source of 5V