STM32 Development on Mac OS X

As part of Input Devices week in MAS.863 How To Make Almost Anything I wanted to work with the STM32 microcontroller, and had a STM32F3 Discovery board provided by the class. I spent almost two days trying to figure out how to compile and run programs on the device using my Mac. Frustrated by other guides to getting STM32 development working I decided to make my own.

First, install homebrew if you don’t have it already:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

I wrote two simple homebrew formulae for the components needed to compile and run code on the STM32.
To install:

brew tap nitsky/stm32
brew install arm-none-eabi-gcc
brew install --HEAD stlink

This installs a GCC compiler for ARM along with STLink, a great utility which manages a connection with the STLink JTAG programmer. It broadcasts a gdb server on port 4242 that you can use to control the STM32.

Now everything is ready to load and run a program.

In one terminal tab, run st-util

In another terminal tab, run arm-none-eabi-gdb

In GDB you need to connect to the STLink server:

(gdb) tar ext :4242

Now you can load firmware and run it.

(gdb) load blink.elf
(gdb) run

If you are new to the STM32 I have an example project on GitHub.