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Developing with ARM Microcontrollers/Processors - Getting Familiar with the CoIDE

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In this video I’m going to show you how to start a new program in the CoIDE environment. When you first start the CoIDE program, you will see a welcome screen which has all the information you need to start a new project, open an existing project, and view the repository for libraries you may need. Lets click on the new project icon to start a new project. You’ll be presented with a screen that allows you select a variety of microcontrollers starting with the manufacturer. Included in this selection are controllers from ARM, Freescale, NXP, Nuveton, ST, Toshiba, and Spansion. In this video we’ll be focusing on the ST micro line of microcontrollers and the F0 series is what we’re going to be using initially. You can view different series of microcontrollers in the series list on the left-hand menu. The microcontroller we’re using is the F030 series and the R8T6. We can select this and and create a new project from this microcontroller. You are presented with a dialog box that will allow you to put in a project name, and it shows you the path that you can use for these projects. This is a default path. CoIDE will be under your main user and the CoIDE subfolder path. Name your project folder and save.

This screen is rather important because it is going to show you all of the libraries and different resources that will allow you to program for this specific microcontroller. For this microcontroller there aren’t many resources available, just the core resources which are all we really need anyway. The resource we need is the stm32f030x8_boot. When you click on it, it will add the other resources it requires for the proper functioning of the library you select. Click on it and you will see information that is like a readme file for the library itself. You can click on links to find out various features of this library. Go back to the file directory and click “add” on the stm32f030x8_boot file. You will notice it will require the cmsis_core which is a library that is specific to ARM architecture. If you made a mistake and did not want to add that particular library, you can just press remove. You will also notice that these files and folders appear on the pane on the left-hand side. You can check all of the header files that are within these library folders. The main headers will be under the Src folder. This completes setting up the new project. You can exit the welcome and repository screens.

You can now open up your main.c file which has the main entry point and the never-ending loop. We should be able to build this program even though there is really nothing in it. You will find your build information on the bottom. When you build you’ll notice initially there are a lot of errors that appear on your console. You will see there are a lot of them, but each one is actually referring to a single file. The issue is that the file stm32f0xx_hal_conf.h is saying there is no such file in the directory. It is referring to this file in the header file and if you open it you will see that it had an #include that tries to include this file and it is within an if else statement where you will use this file if this define has been found as true or if it is false. What we need to do is try to locate this file and put it into its proper location. You will also notice that when you look into the real file structure, that this does not show the same information as the Windows explorer would show like the hierarchy of folders. Here is the folder for the GPIO tutorial on the hard drive. It is located in the workspace folder where we specified it. You will see many folders which are not shown in the hierarchy breakdown of folders. We need to go into the folder the error is telling us to go. You will also see the CooCox master is not showing up either so it may seem a little confusing.

Go into the stm32f030x8_boot folder and this is where all the source folders are. So the boot will have this information in it. Go into the source folder and locate the file that cannot be found. Look in the filepath on the error to see what folder it is located under. We go into the Inc folder and we cannot find this file, there is only the template of the file. We actually did find the file located in the “test” folder, so copy the file from the "test" folder and paste it into the “source” folder. Now lets try to build the code and check the console. The build was successful total time was one second. So that is how to create a new project in the CoIDE, unfortunately there is a bit of a hitch when you’re doing that but there is a simple solution to make it work. So in summary what we’ve done is: create a new project using the welcome screen, associated that project to the correct microcontroller, and built the file after correcting an error that we found after finding the needed dependencies. Thank you for watching.

Next Page: Connecting the ST-Link v2 to the STM32 Microcontroller

ARM STM32 Microcontroller Series Index:

Introduction
Installing and Setting up the IDE
Connect the ST-Link v2 Interface to your Computer
Introduction to the CoIDE
Connecting the ST-Link v2 to the STM32 Microcontroller