Let‘s get familiar with the hardware we’ll be working with.
We'll refer to this board as “F3” throughout this book.
What does this board contain?
A STM32F303VCT6 microcontroller. This microcontroller has
A single core ARM Cortex-M4F processor with hardware support for single precision floating point operations and a maximum clock frequency of 72 MHz.
256 KiB of “Flash” memory. (1 KiB = 1024 bytes)
48 KiB of RAM.
many “peripherals”: timers, GPIO, I2C, SPI, USART, etc.
lots of “pins” that are exposed in the two lateral “headers”.
IMPORTANT This microcontroller operates at (around) 3.3V.
An accelerometer and a magnetometer (in a single package).
8 user LEDs arranged in the shape of a compass
A second microcontroller: a STM32F103CBT. This microcontroller is actually part of an on-board programmer and debugger named ST-LINK and is connected to the USB port named “USB ST-LINK”.
There's a second USB port, labeled “USB USER” that is connected to the main microcontroller, the STM32F303VCT6, and can be used in applications.