PCB Layout Designing: Top 8 Tips on How to Design a PCB Layout for Beginners!

PCB Designing is a crucial step in a PCB Assembly Process. The printed circuit board is the project's final step, and we use it to validate a PCB prototype.

Any electronic enthusiast should have the ability to design PCB layouts if he is a pupil, an expert in the business, or a hobbyist. The construction of a proper PCB layout is an integral part of every PCB manufacturer. In this article, we'll show you the top 8 PCB Layout Design Tips for Total Beginners.

Build and install NodeMcu firmware on ESP8266 boards

I got some ESP8266 NodeMcu boards that came with pre-installed firmware. Yet, the first thing I did was to upload the Arduino blink sketch on them using ESP8266 development kit for Arduino. Obviously, this has overwritten the default firmware. Now, I want to try NodeMcu as well. I discovered there is more than a binary that you have to flash to the development boards. In fact, you have to build this by yourself, depending on your needs. I'll overview in this post the available options for building and flashing the firmware using Linux and Windows computers.

NodeMCU is an open-source Lua based firmware for the ESP8266 WiFi SoC from Espressif and uses an on-module flash-based SPIFFS file system. NodeMCU is implemented in C and is now community-supported and compatible with any ESP module. The NodeMCU programming model is similar to that of Node.js, only in Lua. It is asynchronous and event-driven. Many functions, therefore, have parameters for callback functions.

External interrupts on STM32 bluepill

The bluepill is a cheap STM32F103 development board. It can be programmed even from Arduino IDE with an additional boards package. But to get the most out of it, you should develop software using the development kit from ST. This is because STM32 is much more complex than ATmega microcontrollers used by some Arduino boards. While the latter are use 8 bit CPUs, STM32F103 contains a 32 bit ARM Cortex CPU.

It's not my first attempt to program the STM32 bluepill using HAL library from ST. This post contains information about the tools you need to install in order to program the board. I'm going to make a new project in System Workbench and I will use the same clock configuration routine from the mentioned post (the SystemClock_Config() function). Then I will write code that toggles an LED when you push a button using interrupts.

STM32 bluepill on the breadboard

Upload binary and debug STM32 bluepill on Eclipse

The blue pill is a STM32 development board which can be programmed in multiple ways. You can use Arduino IDE, mBed OS or HAL library from ST. This post is about STM32 development using HAL. There is a plugin for Eclipse that adds features for working with this family of microcontrollers (MCU) and there is also System Workbench for STM32 (SW4STM32), a complete development environment based on Eclipse IDE.

In a previous post I talked about STM32 development on SW4STM32. At that time I was just beginning with this MCU and after I was compiling the project binary, I used ST-Link tools to upload it to the board. That worked, but it was uncomfortable to launch ST-link utility or call st-flash after each build. More important, I lost all debug options with this method. I didn't knew then that Eclipse/SW4STM32 can be configured to automatically upload (burn) binary to MCU and debug it. Configuration procedure is a one-time process per project.

STM32Cube code initialization for “blue pill”

Lately I’ve playing around with the STM32F103 development board known as “blue pill”. Developing software for it is not as easy as for Arduino boards. The MCU contains a 32-bit ARM CPU. I have previously tried to write software for this board using HAL library, but I didn’t get the most out of it because I found the programming model rather complicated.

One of the methods to develop software for this MCU is to use ST HAL library (which uses a higher level API than other libraries for this MCU). I chose the Eclipse IDE with a set of plugins for STM32 family. There is an easier way to get the SDK and IDE with the toolchain called System Workbench for STM32 (recommended by ST too). This is the download directory where you can find all releases for the major operating systems. But before creating a blank project in SW4STM32, you should know that there is a tool which can create this project for you. Not quite blank, as you will configure the MCU with a graphical tool in a step-by-step process.

STM32 “blue pill” easy development with Mbed

The "blue pill" is an STM32F103 based development board. Although it is less popular, the board is cheaper than an Arduino Nano. More than that, STM32F103 is a device with Cortex-M3 ARM CPU that runs at 72 MHz, 20 kB of RAM and 64 or 128 kB of flash memory. The microcontroller (MCU) has USB port, two serial ports, 16 bit PWM pins and 12 bit ADC pins. It runs at 3.3V, but some of its pins are 5V tolerant.

I tried to program this development board using both Arduino IDE and STM32 HAL, but I wasn’t quite satisfied. Arduino framework is simplified and does not take advantage of platform’s features, while HAL was quite difficult for me. Using HAL in Eclipse come with another disadvantage: direct uploading of the binary in flash didn’t work, so I had to use ST-Link tools to upload it, outside of Eclipse. Recently I heard of PlatformIO IDE. This is a development environment supplied as Visual Studio Code or Atom plugin. One of its great advantages is the support for more than 500 development boards! Although VS Code and Atom are cross platform software, they are not at all lightweight, so you’ll need rather good hardware to run them smoothly.

Another great feature of PlatformIO is that for a development board you have multiple framework options. You can program the bluepill using Arduino API, just as you would do in Arduino IDE. Or you can program it using STM32Cube API. But, there is also Mbed OS framework, which I found it to be quite easy to develop.