Black Magic Probe on Blue Pill

This is a writeup on flashing Blue Pill (a cheap STM32 ARM devboard) with Black Magic Probe (BMP). This is one of the cheapest JTAG/SWD debugger options for ARM Cortex MCUs.

The tool itself was developed as opensource by a team of amazing people. You can buy a ready made BMP at 1BitSquared which I recommend if you can spare the money and aren't looking for uses for all the devboards in your drawer.

For writeups of other peoples' processes see explanation of how to use nix by marble and another one by Olivier Fauchon.

To follow this process you'll need:

  • Blue Pill with STM32F103 with 128k Flash
  • a TTL level UART (USB to UART in my case)
  • a PC with linux (this process is Debian-like linux specific, similar tools are available for MacOS and Windows, but are not described here)

First install the compiler, the stm32flash and dfu-util for flashing the Blue Pill board and add yourself to the dialout group for access to serial ports.

 sudo apt install gcc-arm-none-eabi
 sudo apt install stm32flash
 sudo apt install dfu-util
 sudo adduser $USER dialout

Clone the Black Magic repository and cd into the directory.

 git clone git@github.com:blacksphere/blackmagic.git
 cd blackmagic/

Based on documentation in blackmagic/src/platform/swlink/README.md the correct platform for my Blue Pill is "swlink". Run make with the correct PROBE_HOST parameter.

make clean
make PROBE_HOST=swlink

This should build 2 files, one with the actual firmware, one with the DFU bootloader as seen on the output below.

  LD      blackmagic.elf
  OBJCOPY blackmagic.bin
  CC      platforms/swlink/usbdfu.c
  CC      platforms/stm32/dfucore.c
  CC      platforms/stm32/dfu_f1.c
  LD      blackmagic_dfu.elf
  OBJCOPY blackmagic_dfu.bin
  OBJCOPY blackmagic_dfu.hex

Next flash the DFU bootloader. Set BOOT0 jumper to 1 and BOOT1 jumper to 01. Connect the TTL-level UART (Tx to A10, Rx to A9, GND to GND). After that connect the power.

NOTE If you're using a USB to UART converter with 5V pin exposed you probably want to also use it to power the devboard. If you're using an external power source (like the USB port) remember that all Grounds have to be equal.

Blue Pill devboard with jumpers visible, USB port facing left, top jumper marked BOOT0 set to 1 (right position), bottom jumper marked BOOT1 set to 0 (left position), wires attached to A9, A10, 5V and G pins

Then flash the DFU bootloader with the following command.

stm32flash -w blackmagic_dfu.bin -v -g 0x8000000 /dev/ttyUSB0

In my case the USB to UART converter is at /dev/ttyUSB0, check dmesg to figure out which device appears after pluging your UART converter in.

Wait until the stm32flash tool is done.

stm32flash 0.5

http://stm32flash.sourceforge.net/

Using Parser : Raw BINARY
Interface serial_posix: 57600 8E1
Version      : 0x22
Option 1     : 0x00
Option 2     : 0x00
Device ID    : 0x0410 (STM32F10xxx Medium-density)
- RAM        : 20KiB  (512b reserved by bootloader)
- Flash      : 128KiB (size first sector: 4x1024)
- Option RAM : 16b
- System RAM : 2KiB
Write to memory
Erasing memory
Wrote and verified address 0x08001e7c (100.00%) Done.

Starting execution at address 0x08000000... done.

After the process is done disconnect power, disconnect the UART, set BOOT0 and BOOT1 jumpers to 0 and connect the Blue Pill board to your PC via USB on the Blue Pill devboard.

Output of dmesg should show the device recognised as Black Magic Probe.

[1805904.543529] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1d50, idProduct=6017, bcdDevice= 1.00
[1805904.543535] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[1805904.543539] usb 1-1: Product: Black Magic Probe DFU (SWLINK) v1.7.1-283-ge1a928b
[1805904.543542] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Black Sphere Technologies
[1805904.543544] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: xxxxxxxx

To flash the actual firmware use dfu-util.

sudo dfu-util -d 1d50:6017 -s 0x8002000:leave -D blackmagic.bin

which should report that the download completed successfully.

dfu-util 0.9

Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc.
Copyright 2010-2016 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt
This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/

dfu-util: Invalid DFU suffix signature
dfu-util: A valid DFU suffix will be required in a future dfu-util release!!!
Opening DFU capable USB device...
ID 1d50:6017
Run-time device DFU version 011a
Claiming USB DFU Interface...
Setting Alternate Setting #0 ...
Determining device status: state = dfuIDLE, status = 0
dfuIDLE, continuing
DFU mode device DFU version 011a
Device returned transfer size 1024
DfuSe interface name: "Internal Flash   "
Downloading to address = 0x08002000, size = 103400
Download    [=========================] 100%       103400 bytes
Download done.
File downloaded successfully
Transitioning to dfuMANIFEST state

After resetting the board dmesg should show additional 2 serial devices.

[1805962.040564] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1d50, idProduct=6018, bcdDevice= 1.00
[1805962.040569] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[1805962.040573] usb 1-1: Product: Black Magic Probe (SWLINK) v1.7.1-283-ge1a928b
[1805962.040576] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Black Sphere Technologies
[1805962.040579] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: xxxxxxxx
[1805962.044634] cdc_acm 1-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
[1805962.045446] cdc_acm 1-1:1.2: ttyACM1: USB ACM device

This completes the flashing, to verify that the Black Magic Probe is functioning correctly start gdb, connect to the debugger at the first ACM device and query for the monitor version.

gdb
GNU gdb (Ubuntu 9.2-0ubuntu1~20.04) 9.2
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
[...]

(gdb) target extended-remote /dev/ttyACM0
Remote debugging using /dev/ttyACM0

(gdb) monitor version
Black Magic Probe(SWLINK) v1.7.1-283-ge1a928b, Hardware Version 1
Copyright (C) 2015  Black Sphere Technologies Ltd.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

(gdb) q

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