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Reliable source or Blue Pill boards

Open mamejay opened this issue 2 years ago • 20 comments

Not really an issue but I have had not luck getting working Blue Pills. Does anyone have a trusted seller of Blue Pill boards that they can recommend? Thanks

mamejay avatar Jul 16 '22 10:07 mamejay

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001169143888.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32377410710.html

vitecd avatar Jul 17 '22 06:07 vitecd

Thanks for that Vitecd. So have you purchased from this seller recently and they have been ok?

mamejay avatar Jul 17 '22 22:07 mamejay

Yes, I have pills from both suppliers. Cheers

vitecd avatar Jul 18 '22 01:07 vitecd

OK. I have ordered 5 of the second link you sent. I find the super cheap ones are always duds. Now we wait and see

mamejay avatar Jul 19 '22 08:07 mamejay

Just to let everyone know. Received the Blue Pills and they program fine except they will not boot. I have so many of these duds now I am just giving up.

mamejay avatar Jul 28 '22 08:07 mamejay

I just order one from the second link of vitecd, hopefully I will receive the same as mamejay. Once received (usually takes 1 month for shipping where I live) I will test it myself. If I have the same issues, I will try to debug this further, making bad units work would be very interesting.

retro16 avatar Jul 28 '22 13:07 retro16

Excellent. I hope you can get these working. I have only been testing with 2.x code as I have not modified any boards for 3.x code. With the modifications for a 2.x board will 2.x firmware still work or do I need to just use 3.x firmware? I just test my boards using a patari games image. Will this still work on 3.x?

mamejay avatar Jul 30 '22 04:07 mamejay

You can safely flash 3.x to 2.x units. All you risk is having read-only drives and a little bit of unstability at reboot. Read-only problem can be worked around by patching ACSI_SD_WRITE_LOCK to 0 in acsi2stm.h. 3.x provides its own embedded driver so you don't need any image to test the unit, in fact you don't even need an SD card !

retro16 avatar Jul 30 '22 06:07 retro16

How do you know its working without a SDCARD?

mamejay avatar Jul 30 '22 09:07 mamejay

3.x embeds setup software and a boot driver directly into the STM32 firmware. You can access the setup tool by mashing the Shift+S keys during Atari boot. See the a2setup doc for more info. Of course, to load and save files or do anything useful, you need a SD card.

retro16 avatar Jul 30 '22 10:07 retro16

OK. Did more testing of these boards. I have always used a STMLink to program the boards and decided to use a serial USB. My working board program fine with it but when I try with these new Blue Pills I get the follow.

C:\arduino-1.8.5_Portable\hardware\Arduino_STM32-master/tools/win/serial_upload.bat COM7 {upload.altID} {upload.usbID} C:\Users\Jason\AppData\Local\Temp\arduino_build_582505/acsi2stm.ino.bin Failed to init device. stm32flash 0.4

http://stm32flash.googlecode.com/

Using Parser : Raw BINARY Interface serial_w32: 115200 8E1

I suspect something is a miss with these boards. Any advise?

mamejay avatar Jul 31 '22 00:07 mamejay

I just order one from the second link of vitecd, hopefully I will receive the same as mamejay. Once received (usually takes 1 month for shipping where I live) I will test it myself. If I have the same issues, I will try to debug this further, making bad units work would be very interesting.

Did you manage to get your hands on those boards yet?

mamejay avatar Aug 25 '22 06:08 mamejay

Hello, I received one this week from Mega Semiconductor CO., Ltd. and it is useless. Programs fine using serial, but the STE doesn't boot on it. In debug mode, it enters a strange soft reset loop that makes no sense. I didn't check more than that. For programming issues, maybe reflashing the bootloader with Roger Clark's would restore serial programming: https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/STM32duino-bootloader/blob/master/binaries/generic_boot20_pc13.bin.

retro16 avatar Aug 28 '22 09:08 retro16

Far out! Oh well at least it was not me. I managed to buy 20 STM chips from LSCS for like $3.5USD but now they are out of stock. I have just been replacing the chips on the shit boards with the genuine ones and they are working

mamejay avatar Aug 29 '22 08:08 mamejay

For the record, my bad STM32 chip has its text marking way off center and not 100% aligned, the font is also thinner than the other models. Not sure whether it's a sign of something smelly, but it confirms that there are some bad clones. The PCB and other components were good quality though, it seems that the issue is in the STM32 chip itself. I will keep this github issue opened as a sort of forum thread so people can give their feedback about their experience.

retro16 avatar Aug 29 '22 08:08 retro16

Magics around... Need to buy something fresh and fall to debugging

On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 8:48 PM Jean-Matthieu COULON < @.***> wrote:

For the record, my bad STM32 chip has its text marking way off center and not 100% aligned, the font is also thinner than the other models. Not sure whether it's a sign of something smelly, but it confirms that there are some bad clones. The PCB and other components were good quality though, it seems that the issue is in the STM32 chip itself. I will keep this github issue opened as a sort of forum thread so people can give their feedback about their experience.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/retro16/acsi2stm/issues/27#issuecomment-1229968476, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACMHVL23QSUXTGN36HCAHUDV3R2ONANCNFSM53X4SB2Q . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>

vitecd avatar Aug 29 '22 10:08 vitecd

I have recently bought STM32F103CBT6 chips from KINGDEVIL store, and they seem to work fine: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003586463686.html

Have you verified your BluePills with this: https://mecrisp-stellaris-folkdoc.sourceforge.io/bluepill-diags-v1.640.html

Recently bought ST-Link V2 clones have some strange Apexmic chip, which rejects to work with SM32 Cube Programmer.

TzOk83 avatar Oct 01 '22 22:10 TzOk83

Dropping a line to indicate that 4.00 works around a very sneaky (and semi-random) hardware bug on the STM32. Many units that didn't work reliably before will work correctly. Also, to properly test a unit's stability, you can use ACSITEST.TOS with the buffer and command tests that spam DMA and command bytes.

It'll keep the issue opened as a reference as it may be an interesting topic for newcomers.

retro16 avatar Jun 04 '23 11:06 retro16

I have been using these from Amazon without any issues so far with 3.x and 4.x

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VKSVM21/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

jfceklosky avatar Jul 18 '23 12:07 jfceklosky

These are a another reliable source for asci2stm.

I have personally tested the software with these, version 3.X and 4.X

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B3X4BH4Q/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

jfceklosky avatar Aug 20 '23 12:08 jfceklosky