"Black pill" board?

Hello everyone,

Has anyone seen/used this board before?

At first glance, it looks like a “black” Blue Pill board. For port A and B, it has the same pins brought out, but for port C, only PC13, which I can only assume is for the on-board LED. It also has less gnd and 3V3 pins and no 5V and VBat. For the price, I am quite tempted to buy 5. Seeing that this board is so close to the Blue Pill board, I assume it should work?

Thank you

it has already extensively been discussed in the bluepill vs redpill thread

Thank you, I think I will give it a skip for now

Yes. It works

I have one of them.

I build a bootloader for its config (LED is not on same pin as the Blue Pill)

Which would you suggest?

I have been using many regular Blue Pill boards from various sellers, so I guess any of the following?

STM32F103C8T6 ARM STM32 Minimum System Development Boards

Just for cross referencing, the Black Pill was discussed in the Blue Pill Red Pill thread, here http://www.stm32duino.com/viewtopic.php … ill#p19277

I have not had time to look at the Black Pill in detail, but it does have a stronger USB connector than the Blue Pill, which is an advanAge, but the PCB is bigger and wider, and leaves less space around it in a breadboard.

I dont recall what the USB pullup resistor value is, but it worked for me without modification

Kenjutsu wrote:Hello everyone,

Has anyone seen/used this board before?

At first glance, it looks like a “black” Blue Pill board. For port A and B, it has the same pins brought out, but for port C, only PC13, which I can only assume is for the on-board LED. It also has less gnd and 3V3 pins and no 5V and VBat. For the price, I am quite tempted to buy 5. Seeing that this board is so close to the Blue Pill board, I assume it should work?

Thank you

Benji

I have one of them as well, and it worked fine. Its also better than the Blue Pill because the USB connector is much stronger.

The Blue (and Red) Pill have very cheap USB connectors which often break off the top of the PCB as they are only secured by a couple of small PCB pads. The Black Pill has through hole fixings on the USB connector, making it a lot stronger

I believe I may have found the schematic for the black pill. If so it can be added to the wiki. My boards are on order, so I can’t verify that this is the right drawing. The 1.5k USB resistor is shown on the schematic as R7. Schematic is here.

fredbox wrote:I believe I may have found the schematic for the black pill. If so it can be added to the wiki. My boards are on order, so I can’t verify that this is the right drawing. The 1.5k USB resistor is shown on the schematic as R7. Schematic is here.

My boards arrived in this morning’s mail. I was able to easily flash the bootloader and get them working. After flashing a blink sketch, the board enumerates properly:
[Sat Jan 21 10:36:10 2017] usb 3-3: new full-speed USB device number 81 using xhci_hcd
[Sat Jan 21 10:36:10 2017] usb 3-3: New USB device found, idVendor=1eaf, idProduct=0004
[Sat Jan 21 10:36:10 2017] usb 3-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[Sat Jan 21 10:36:10 2017] usb 3-3: Product: Maple
[Sat Jan 21 10:36:10 2017] usb 3-3: Manufacturer: LeafLabs
[Sat Jan 21 10:36:10 2017] usb 3-3: ep 0x82 - rounding interval to 1024 microframes, ep desc says 2040 microframes
[Sat Jan 21 10:36:10 2017] cdc_acm 3-3:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device


fredbox wrote:….

I updated the wiki to include the bootloader flashing instructions for Linux.

Just received these board. They seem much lighter than blue pill. There’s no 5V pin.

Interesting thing is that st-link utility in Windows reports 128kB flash size.

Looks like I’m having some sort of connectivity issues with this board. I have flashed latest bootloader and it enumerates OK. But occasionally connecting to USB serial port does not work i.e. the connection does not open even the com port is visible in windows. Any hints how to start troubleshooting ?

Just took delivery of one of these as I thought the mounting hole configuration might come in useful some time. The first thing I noticed was that the power LED didn’t light when power was applied. Then I tried downloading a blink sketch via ST-Link. The download process seemed to work OK, but no sign of the test LED flashing. So, I checked the PB12 pin with a volt meter, and sure enough it was alternating between 0 and 3.3V. So, it looks like the QC on these boards is a bit lacking — you would think that checking the power and test LEDs were working was the minimum they would do!

RogerL wrote:….
So, it looks like the QC on these boards is a bit lacking — you would think that checking the power and test LEDs were working was the minimum they would do!

Sounds like the LEDs might be in back to front…. better be careful, they might be sucking all the light out of the room

ahull wrote:Sounds like the LEDs might be in back to front…. better be careful, they might be sucking all the light out of the room