board has the hardware solder pads, so can we add it?

i’ve seen a number of stm32 boards with the device pads present, typically for a sd card sockets, spi flash or eeprom.
doing the soldering might require a microscope, but it’s do-able
subject to doing multimeter checks of the tracks, is the device then usable via a library?
.
stephen

Probably is, I have a board that has space for a spi flash memory, which I plan to solder as soon as I receive it. Most of the time is just cost savings, not installing something that might not be used, but if you post a link to your board, it may help to see if someone has tested adding parts to that board already.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/NEW-ARRI … 99925.html
it’s also the first board i’ve killed in 40 odd years, picked up the wrong psu barrel plug 12v not 5v

but the one i’m looking at is smaller and the only empty pads i suspect are for a s08 cam driver
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/ARM-Cort … 33756.html.

i am also interested in the boards with a 40pin connector for a LCD as i just happen to have one
would that 40pin connector a ‘standard pinout’ and it’s ‘mapping/usage’?

stephen

Stephen

Re:40 pin display.

I have one of those as well. I presume you have a similar one to me, i.e uses 16 bit wide data/ command bus, plus has a SD card slot, and also touch screen wires ?

AFIK
No one had ported the library for that sort of display.

I don’t expect it would be incredibly hard to port, but it would be something you’d need to do.

Re:Soldering SM chips

It can be done. There are various videos on youtube , showing how to do it, but its a bit tricky, and i generally avoid doing it, especially on boards next to existing components.

If you really want some external RAM of Flash, there are already some F103V and F103Z boards on sale e.g. on eBay and AliExpress which have those chips on them.
I suspect the cost of the board including the RAM is only marginally more than another board plus the cost of buying SPI flash or I2C RAM chips etc

well i just happen to have a couple of those spi flash soic handy, part number was in the silk screen

for soldering, i just cascade my 3.00x specs and my headband magnifier, the solder looks like a welding rod.

any idea of which library/libraries?
i would have thought with that many pins, there’s an api defined somewhere that driver chip must meet and it’s the low
level stuff (init, set/clear pixel etc) that needs to be written/confirmed for the particular chip? (compare utft).

i don’t seem to have much success with those 2.4″ 320×240 LCD TFT screens, either plain or shield, currently 0 from 8

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:
i don’t seem to have much success with those 2.4″ 320×240 LCD TFT screens, either plain or shield, currently 0 from 8
stephen

Stephen,

I don’t have either of those, but I have one board that has an eeprom soldered, and the pads for a flash. From the board description I know it is for an spi flash, without ever checking it electrically. I am waiting on some SPI flash ics, then I will check which pins those pads go to, and solder the flash chip.
On the second board you linked I see the pads for a soic 8 ic, but I doesn’t say whether that is for SPI flash or i2c eeprom.

If you can find the same board in taobao.com, then translate the page with google translator, you may see if they say that’s for spi flash or i2c.

Now as Roger said, you may be able to find the exact same board with an SPI flash already soldered for the same price, or just cents more, which may make more sense than having to find out what the pads are for, and then spend your time soldering it.
But if you confirm from someone selling the board that’s for SPI flash, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to use it.
I have tested the SPI driver in ports 1 and 2, and I’m sure it works in port 3 for devices for port 3, and if it doesn’t work out of the box, I’m sure we can get it working.

About the LCD displays, which ones are the ones that you can’t get to work?
There are a bunch of different display drivers tested and working on i2c and SPI, and most Arduino spi drivers can be ported without much trouble.

2.4″ LCD i believe they are il9341, however i’ve been the Adafruit gfx/il9341, TFTLCD, UTFT &U8glib routes, not a flicker.
i was using an Uno clone for the above, i also tried them on a mega.
all of them, shield or vanilla are consistently displaying the white screen. haven’t tried the touchscreen at all

i’ve order a couple of 3.2 inch with the 40 pin connector tft lcds, driver is SSD1289
googled stm32 & SSD1289
i can see myself here https://github.com/notro/fbtft/wiki/SSD1289 frequently

i’m pretty sure that the soic8 pads are for a cam driver as they’re immediately adjacent to the select usb/cam jumpers.

the spi-flash part (2 on route)was
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/25Q64CVA … 36530.html

conclusion:- if the pads are there and we fit the right part, chances are we’ll be able to use it.

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:2.4″ LCD i believe they are il9341, however i’ve been the Adafruit gfx/il9341, TFTLCD, UTFT &U8glib routes, not a flicker.
i was using an Uno clone for the above, i also tried them on a mega.
all of them, shield or vanilla are consistently displaying the white screen. haven’t tried the touchscreen at all

i’ve order a couple of 3.2 inch with the 40 pin connector tft lcds, driver is SSD1289
googled stm32 & SSD1289
i can see myself here https://github.com/notro/fbtft/wiki/SSD1289 frequently

i’m pretty sure that the soic8 pads are for a cam driver as they’re immediately adjacent to the select usb/cam jumpers.

the spi-flash part (2 on route)was
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/25Q64CVA … 36530.html

conclusion:- if the pads are there and we fit the right part, chances are we’ll be able to use it.

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:2.4″ LCD i believe they are il9341, however i’ve been the Adafruit gfx/il9341, TFTLCD, UTFT &U8glib routes, not a flicker.

@victor_py
oops, i’ll be making those into j packges on 0.1″, off we go again….soic8x10 ordered, aliexpress 35p digi-key 67p
pysol time again

the blurb says 3v3/5v, i must bring my doubting thomas to the fore in the future

& @zoomx
i’ll be giving a blue Baite pill a go with the 2.4 inch lcd”s later, the shields aren’t bread board friendly

i’m also going to try i2c with a 0.96″ 128×64 OLED, so i currently have the i2c 4k7 bus resistors pulled to 3.3v which i’m sure
is correct, i’m debating adding a level converter which i think means adding another pair of 4k7 to the high side.

stephen

the rest…

The display with the black header is exactly the same one I use.
That works great with any of the ILI9341 libraries in the core, I believe there are 2 or 3.
One is called ILI9341_due, that uses DMA and is really fast. There is another called ILI9341_AS_STM, which I believe is just as fast, that can use extra fonts, I dont remember off the top of my head what was the difference with the other.
Then there is the ILI9341 originally ported, which works exactly like the Adafruit one and works great too.

There should be example files inside the folders for each library, try using one of the examples.
You need to use all the pins except for the touch ones.
DC, RST and CS can be in any IO pin. LED should be connected straight to 3.3V if I remember right.
MOSI, MISO and SCK go to the SPI1 ports in the STM board.
DO NOT USE the board hardware SS pin. Depending what version of the core you have, that did not work. It was corrected recently, so if you just downloaded the core from Roger’s repo, should be good.

The other board with the yellow headers is common too, but I don’t have it, so I can’t say what do you need to connect.

i never ever use the hardware ss, all i do is configure it as an output and set it high, at least on avr

the boards with yellow pins are arduino uno/mega shields.

totally dejected depressed on my success with these displays 0 from N(at least 10 so far)
i’d almost be happy with just having one work!

stephen

zmemw16 wrote:i never ever use the hardware ss, all i do is configure it as an output and set it high, at least on avr

the boards with yellow pins are arduino uno/mega shields.

totally dejected depressed on my success with these displays 0 from N(at least 10 so far)
i’d almost be happy with just having one work!

stephen

Stephen

I have a number of the Ili9341 displays with the black header ( except mine dont have the touch input). The all work fine for me as well.
I even use the CS pin as i have more than one device on SPI.

To elaborate on the SS pin issue. It is hopefully fixed, but i dont always trust it to work, so i use an alternative SS pin e.g. PB5 that is not part of the hardwire SPI area.
( the issue was caused by a bug / feature in the STM32 chip its self, which basically makes it almost unusable as an automatic hardware chip select control, but we have attempted to set it back to just being a GPIO pin even during SPI operations )

I will double check which of the libraries I’m using.

NOTE.
You must not have a normal copy of the ILI9431 library, or the Adafruit graphics lib etc in your Arduino Libraries, because they override the STM32 specific libraries

i.e. Unfortunately the Arduino IDE does not have a sensible way to allow selection of libraries to suit different families of processors

Hence sometimes you need to remove you existing libs from the Libraries folder, so that the IDE uses the STM32 ones supplied in the repo

i was logged in, timed out maybe?
made me log in and it lost my draft post
can we have a timed save a draft facility?
like every 10mins or so, save a draft or update saved draft of a post

summary then
most of a’noon & evening, trying to get 0.96 oled, 4 pin i2c and 7 pin 4 wire spi versions to do something
i arrived at conclusin of i’m missing something blindingly obvious
i used i2c(1) and not i2c(2) as found in hindsight looking at the sketch and library files
went with RayB oled_bmp files, but of course his oled is 6 pin
so i’m not following the way the signals are used: RST seems to be sck, cs isn’t used, dc is cs?? …

i’ll try the i2c oled tomorrow, PB6 & PB7 ==> PB10 & PB11 on the breadboard.
also i’ve the 2.4 lcd wired on a breadboard for tomorrow,
p3 on display to PB3
p7 “” “” “” PB7
p9 “” “” “” PB8

bit banged spi…

stephen

i’ll also flush my sketchbook/libraries of all Adafruit_* libraries
srp

zmemw16 wrote:i’ll also flush my sketchbook/libraries of all Adafruit_* libraries
srp