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Flashing an STM32

How to load firmware on the most common ARM microcontroller family

Mattia Maldini
9 min readJul 24, 2022

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If you landed here I’m going to assume you have a binary firmware ready to be loaded onto an STM32-like-kinda-similarish device.
If not, you should definitely prepare one! Then come back when you are ready.

There area a few options when approaching this task that are more or less valid depending on what actually is your target.
Official STM32 discovery boards (such as https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/nucleo-f030r8.html) integrate an st-link download tool, so they can be just plugged in as USB devices.
If you have something like a Blue Pill you will require external tooling and some wiring to load the firmware.
Fear not, as everything is relatively inexpensive.

Blue Pill board
Blue Pill Board

While most notions here apply to the vast majority of STM32 devices, I will be taking the Blue Pill as main reference.
Unless otherwise specified, I will be assuming you have a valid couple of files named application.elf and application.bin at hand to be loaded onto the device.

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Mattia Maldini

Computer Science Master from Alma Mater Studiorum, Bologna; interested in a wide range of topics, from functional programming to embedded systems.