I’ve been a fan of the STM32 micro-controllers for a long time and EmBitz by Gerard Zagema has been my preferred development environment. I am working on a project that needs a very low-cost microcontroller with fast PWM generation and the new STM32G0 family seems like a perfect fit with packages as small as SO8 and costs under $0.50 with a powerful 32-bit Cortex M0+ core and the same familiar peripheral set as their other uCs.
EmBitz is a light weight, lightning-fast IDE for C and C++ development; previously called Em::Blocks, it is a a fork of Code::Blocks that supports several micro-controller families including STM32 and integrates outstanding debug support. It is free,but I try to support such development and purchased a copy and recommend you do the same. The current version of EmBitz is 1.11; an impending 2.0 release has been announced but is not available yet.
EmBitz 1.11 doesn’t directly support the relatively new STM32G0 family, and many of the STM utilities don’t either (e.g. the latest STLinkUtility 4.5 doesn’t work with it). However, the EmBitz developer has already released an enhanced debugger that supports it and cleanly integrates with EmBitz 1.11. Here’s what I had to do to get STM32G0 development going under EmBitz:
- Download and install EmBitz 1.11 (note that the site may be down if you can’t find a copy, email me for a copy)
- Install EBlink
- Download the zip file (press the green Code button and select Download Zip)
(NOTE: do not download the windows installer, it isn’t passing my virus checker) - Follow these instructions to install it in EmBitz. The instructions aren’t crystal clear:
- unzip the EBlink-master.zip folder
- copy the EBlink win32 folder contents into ${EMBITZ}\1.11\share\EBlink
- copy the EBlink scripts folder into ${EMBITZ}\1.11\share\EBlink
- Download the EBlink interface (v2.0) and extract it to
${EMBITZ}\share\EmBitz\debuggers\Interfaces\
- Download the zip file (press the green Code button and select Download Zip)
- Now, EBlink appears as a debug interface option under GDB Servers and you can use it to load software into your target and debug it in the IDE!
- To create an STM32G0 project, I created an STM32L0 project (since it is also Cortex M0+) and replaced the template files with files I gathered (and somewhat modified) from other STMicroelectronics sources:
- includes: stm32g0xx.h, stm32g031xx.h, system_stm32g0xx.h
- sources: startup_stm32g031xx.s, system_stm32g0xx.c
- linker script: stm32g031_flash.ld
- In the project Build Options:
- Under the Device tab, change the Policy to Use target settings
- Device: cortex-m0plus
- Linker script: ./stm32g031_flash.ld
- Stack: 0x0100 (or whatever stack size you need)
- Under the Compiler Settings #define tab, define STM32G031xx
- Under the Device tab, change the Policy to Use target settings
Note that there is also a process for importing an STM32CubeMx project into EmBitz; see here.