Nucleo F401RE

Overview

The Nucleo F401RE board features an ARM Cortex-M4 based STM32F401RE MCU with a wide range of connectivity support and configurations Here are some highlights of the Nucleo F401RE board:

  • STM32 microcontroller in QFP64 package

  • Two types of extension resources:

    • Arduino Uno V3 connectivity

    • ST morpho extension pin headers for full access to all STM32 I/Os

  • On-board ST-LINK/V2-1 debugger/programmer with SWD connector

  • Flexible board power supply:

    • USB VBUS or external source(3.3V, 5V, 7 - 12V)

    • Power management access point

  • Three LEDs: USB communication (LD1), user LED (LD2), power LED (LD3)

  • Two push-buttons: USER and RESET

More information about the board can be found at the Nucleo F401RE website.

Hardware

Nucleo F401RE provides the following hardware components:

  • STM32F401RET6 in LQFP64 package

  • ARM® 32-bit Cortex®-M4 CPU with FPU

  • 84 MHz max CPU frequency

  • VDD from 1.7 V to 3.6 V

  • 512 KB Flash

  • 96 KB SRAM

  • GPIO with external interrupt capability

  • 12-bit ADC with 16 channels

  • RTC

  • Advanced-control Timer

  • General Purpose Timers (7)

  • Watchdog Timers (2)

  • USART/UART (3)

  • I2C (3)

  • SPI (4)

  • SDIO

  • USB 2.0 OTG FS

  • DMA Controller

More information about STM32F401RE can be found here:

Supported Features

The Zephyr nucleo_401re board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

UART

on-chip

serial port-polling; serial port-interrupt

PINMUX

on-chip

pinmux

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

PWM

on-chip

pwm

I2C

on-chip

i2c

ADC

on-chip

ADC Controller

WATCHDOG

on-chip

System Window Watchdog

die-temp

on-chip

die temperature sensor

RTC

on-chip

rtc

Other hardware features are not yet supported on Zephyr porting.

The default configuration can be found in boards/st/nucleo_f401re/nucleo_f401re_defconfig

Pin Mapping

Nucleo F401RE Board has 6 GPIO controllers. These controllers are responsible for pin muxing, input/output, pull-up, etc.

Available pins:

Nucleo F401RE Arduino connectors Nucleo F401RE Morpho connectors

For more details please refer to STM32 Nucleo-64 board User Manual.

Default Zephyr Peripheral Mapping:

  • UART_1 TX/RX : PB6/PB7

  • UART_2 TX/RX : PA2/PA3 (ST-Link Virtual Port Com)

  • I2C1 SCL/SDA : PB8/PB9 (Arduino I2C)

  • SPI1 CS/SCK/MISO/MOSI : PB6/PA5/PA6/PA7 (Arduino SPI)

  • PWM_2_CH1 : PA0

  • USER_PB : PC13

  • LD2 : PA5

System Clock

Nucleo F401RE System Clock could be driven by internal or external oscillator, as well as main PLL clock. By default System clock is driven by PLL clock at 84MHz, driven by 8MHz high speed external clock.

Serial Port

Nucleo F401RE board has 3 UARTs. The Zephyr console output is assigned to UART2. Default settings are 115200 8N1.

I2C

Nucleo F401RE board has up to 3 I2Cs. The default I2C mapping for Zephyr is:

  • I2C1_SCL : PB8

  • I2C1_SDA : PB9

Programming and Debugging

Nucleo F401RE board includes an ST-LINK/V2-1 embedded debug tool interface.

Applications for the nucleo_f401re board configuration can be built and flashed in the usual way (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Flashing

The board is configured to be flashed using west STM32CubeProgrammer runner, so its installation is required.

Alternatively, OpenOCD or JLink can also be used to flash the board using the --runner (or -r) option:

$ west flash --runner openocd
$ west flash --runner jlink

Flashing an application to Nucleo F401RE

Connect the Nucleo F401RE to your host computer using the USB port, then run a serial host program to connect with your Nucleo board:

$ minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0

Now build and flash an application. Here is an example for Hello World.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b nucleo_f401re samples/hello_world
west flash

You should see the following message on the console:

Hello World! arm

Debugging

You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b nucleo_f401re samples/hello_world
west debug