Hi everyone,

I am a newbie about microcontrollers so I need your help. I have 3 STM32F030K6T6 right now and I want to use them in my projects. But I cant find any info about how I can do this. Google always pops up blue pill when I wrote STM32 programming or something similar. So I am stuck very hard, if I buy blue pill do I have to remove the microcontroller on it and replace with STM32F030K6T6 or there is another solution/s you guys can give me. What hardware and software do I need. Please help me and thanks for your answers already.

 

Presumably you have the bare ICs?

What you need is the IDE (integrated development environment) and a board.
I would suggest that you get the free STM32Cube.

For a development board, you should get STM32F0 Discovery or STM32F030 Nucleo.

 

Thanks for your answer, for using development board where can I get some guidance about how to connect my IC? I cant find any example about connecting bare ICs on development boards

 

STM32F030K6T6 is a 32-pin LQFP package. You will need some kind of PCB to mount the chip.
I would suggest that you learn how to program the development board first using the STM32Cube.

 

" I would suggest that you learn how to program the development board first using the STM32Cube. " thats my first goal. after that what if I remove the IC on the dev board and replace with mine, if its works can I get your opinion.

 

" I would suggest that you learn how to program the development board first using the STM32Cube. " thats my first goal. after that what if I remove the IC on the dev board and replace with mine, if its works can I get your opinion.

No. You do not remove the IC from the dev board.
You will continue to use the dev board to learn how to program the MCU and to program your target MCU.

You need to create your own target board to suit your target application.
On your board you will place a 4-pin programming header in order to program your target MCU.
I will show you how to connect the dev board to your target board in order to program your target MCU.

 

Okay, so when I get the dev board and find out how can I create my own target board I am going to post here again. Thanks for helping me.

 

The formal way is
STM32 CubeIDE
and
https://www2.keil.com/mdk5

there is an Arduino core for stm32 mcus
https://github.com/stm32duino/Arduino_Core_STM32
and a forum here
https://www.stm32duino.com/

STM32F030K6T6 is not yet supported in that STM32duino core. And that this chip is "not recommended for beginners".
It has only 4k sram, it is lots compared to some of the smaller MCUs. But that if you try to run stm32duino on it you will find that you are trying to fit an elephant in a doghouse. The reason is that the current stm32duino core attempts to support a wide variety of stm32 mcus across the series and many of them has different capacities, capabilities and that the io address and features etc across the series has various differences. A more comfortable margin for sram and flash is like 32k sram min (more is merrier), and 64k flash min (128k is preferred) .

a 'recommended' board is like Nucleo F401RE
https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/nucleo-f401re.html
https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32f401re.html
^ this has like 64-96k sram, and like 128-512k flash

there are some beefer offering e.g. from Adafruit
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4382
micropython
https://store.micropython.org/product/PYBLITEv1.0
olimex etc
https://www.olimex.com/Products/ARM/ST/STM32-H405/

then there are the 'cheaper' ones e.g. from AliX
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-stm32f401.html
https://github.com/WeActStudio/WeActStudio.MiniSTM32F4x1
those normally use a stm32f401c{cu,eu} chip which has like 64k sram, 128k flash
the thing about AliX stores is that there are many 'compatible' boards, of which the schematics are never published.
some of the schematics are reverse engineered.

these beefier chips matter if you intend to use libraries especially big ones like TFT LCDs
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_ILI9341
sd card libraries etc
and USB (the on-chip device itself) - in stm32duino you can connect directly to it as an Arduino Serial device. output goes to your "com:" port e.g.

void loop() {
    Serial.println("hello world");
    delay(1000);
}

which are memory hungry
A thing is chips like STM32F030K6T6 don't have on-chip USB, so you would need at least a separate usb-uart dongle to connect to it for serial communications. And you need a separate st-link v2 (SWD/JTAG) programmer or the usb-uart dongle to install firmware.
While all the rest given above are beefier and much faster chips which has on-chip usb and much more on chip peripherals, they also have usb DFU (device firmware update) which made it possible to install firmware/sketch over a (mobile phone) usb cable.

STM32F030K6T6 is more suitable for 'bare metal' programming, i.e. develop from scratch, which newbies unfamiliar with the mcu platform would find it a big challenge to confront or learn the platform details.
For easier, 'getting started' stuff, life is easier with a beefier mcu, a developed core e.g. stm32duino
https://github.com/stm32duino/Arduino_Core_STM32
https://github.com/stm32duino/wiki/wiki
https://www.stm32duino.com/
and maybe with libraries.

 

I can see that you already have got many suggestions. If you need any further assistance, you can post your question to the ST community.

 

Thanks for all of your ideas and helping me. I will post my progress here about target board or stm32duino