Meet Your Hardware

Let’s get familiar with the hardware we’ll be working with.

STM32F3DISCOVERY (the “F3”)

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.
  • A variety of integrated peripherals such as timers, I2C, SPI and USART.
  • General purpose Input Output (GPIO) and other types of pins accessible through the two rows of headers along side the board.
  • A Mini-USB interface accessible through the USB port labeled “USB USER”.
• An accelerometer as part of the LSM303DLHC chip.
• A magnetometer as part of the LSM303DLHC chip.
• A gyroscope as part of the L3GD20 chip.
• 8 user LEDs arranged in the shape of a compass.
• A second microcontroller: a STM32F103. This microcontroller is actually part of an on-board programmer / debugger and is connected to the Mini-USB port named “USB ST-LINK”.

For a more detailed list of features and further specifications of the board take a look at the STMicroelectronics website.

A word of caution: be careful if you want to apply external signals to the board. The microcontroller STM32F303VCT6 pins take a nominal voltage of 3.3 volts. For further information consult the 6.2 Absolute maximum ratings section in the manual