SA developed mini-PCIe IO card By Peet Smit

RS282 x8 USB x4 WLAN Video Capture LVDS Display SATA x4 mSATA-half LAN x2 3G & SIMM Digital IO

Full and Half card sizes

No half length mini-PCIe IO cards available in market

The mini-PCIe IO Card is seen as a USB device Firmware loaded into the card determines the USB type. For example VCP (virtual com port), HID, Mass storage device, etc Two firmware modules (software programs) have been developed these being: 1)VCP ASCII/binary command interface (default) 2)Card test application

Virtual Com Port (VCP) Seen as a serial port i.e. COMx or /dev/ttyACMx Accessed from normal terminal program such as HyperTerminal or Putty Simple command structure: Command : Arg1 : Arg2 : Arg3

Control status / setting – configure card Read all input bits Read single input bit Write to all output bits Write to single output bit Read output bit register – reflects all output bits Read active ADC channels Set DAC 1-3 output to 0 – 4095 of VDD (3.3V)

By applying 3.3V to BOOT0 pin and a momentary grounding NRST pin, the MCU enters boot mode. The DfuSe Demo program is used to load a Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU) file into the flash. There are documents available from ST Microelectronics web site that describe DFU and associated tools.

The default firmware as supplied is good for basic usage but user requirements may require features not supported. There are numerous development options available to a user to develop their own firmware The default firmware was developed using: STM32CubeMX Initialization code generator. Open STM32 tools based IDE.

There are several options Most of the STM32 development boards have a built-in ST-Link utility that can be connected to the IO card and used for programming the flash as well as interactive debugging including SWO. OpenSTM32 supports ST- Link.