【GD32307E-START】Unboxing + Impressions of the board + Lighting ceremony

我的名字真的真的很长

【GD32307E-START】Unboxing + Impressions of the board + Lighting ceremony [Copy link]

First of all, I would like to thank EEWORLD and GigaDevice for providing me with this free evaluation opportunity. Let me introduce myself first. I am a college student and an electronics enthusiast. During my college years, I was not willing to live a boring life, so I taught myself microcontroller technology and had a high passion for electronic design and microcontroller development. I started with Arduino and then studied the STM32 microcontroller in depth. These self-study processes benefited me a lot. At the same time, the school opened a microcontroller course in my junior year, and I learned the 51 microcontroller in class. The two technologies, one new and one old, met in my mind. Many doubts that arose during the self-study process were answered after systematically studying 51. In particular, the 51 microcontroller is programmed in assembly language, which gave me a deeper understanding of the nature of microcontrollers.

It is true that all modern microcomputer technologies originated in the Western world, and the forefront of development is also mainly in the West. Most of us also learn from the products of Western companies. But this does not mean that we do not want to have our own single-chip microcomputers. After all, the United States is strangling our technology, which makes us have an even more urgent need for our own high-tech technologies.

After a series of MCU technology learning, I also learned that there are many companies in China that are making ARM core MCUs. GigaDevice is currently among the best in the domestic MCU industry. In line with the trend of the times, I have long wanted to experience the development of domestic MCUs, to see what innovations it has, and also to see what shortcomings it has. Fortunately, I got the opportunity to evaluate the GD32 307E-START development board for free, and I will talk about it in detail below.

I received the board on September 25th, which was a critical period for me to find a job, so I put it aside and did not study it in detail. Now that the job search has been settled, I have the opportunity to study this development board in detail.

First, here is a full photo of the development board:

Open the outer packaging and take a closer look at the board:

The workmanship of the board is still very fine, and it has everything it should have. There are two buttons on the front, one is reset and the other is a user button. There is also an LED light on the board that can be used to verify the functions of the board.

You can see that there are three USB ports on the board, which really confused me. By consulting the manual and checking the silk screen on the board, I finally figured out the functions of these three USB ports. First, the top USB port is connected to the USB pin of the microcontroller, and secondly, the USB port on the lower left is the USB to UART serial port, and finally, the USB port on the lower right is the GD-LINK download port.

What I want to complain about here is that it’s 2020, why is the USB port on the board still MINI-USB?

Let's not think about TYPE-C for now, can we use the whole MICRO-USB? This MINI-USB cable is really hard to find, and finally I had no choice but to order a MINI-USB cable from JD.com in order to continue the test.

Also, I have to complain a lot : there are three USB ports on the board, but two of them can't power the board!!! Only the GD-LINK port can power the board. I want to ask the designer, what are you thinking? Is it difficult to add two power cords? I don't know how to evaluate this design. Do I have to plug in another power cord when I do serial communication experiments? It's really confusing.

The back of the board is relatively simple, with a voltage regulator chip and a GD32F103C8T6 chip at the bottom, which is burned with GD-LINK firmware and can be used to burn programs to the main chip and perform simulation debugging.

After waiting for a day to get the express, it was time to start the long-awaited lighting ceremony . Plug in the USB cable, turn the switch to Link position, and start working.

The power is on successfully, the yellow-green power light is on, but why is the emm user indicator not on? Shouldn't the user indicator flash? Is it because I turned it on incorrectly?

Try it again, plug in the USB cable, turn the switch to Link, and start

Still the same, no difference. I observed carefully, the left one of the two LED lights marked L-LED2 and L-LED1 in the lower right corner was flickering slightly. Did the designer put the LED here? It shouldn't be. From the circuit analysis, this should be the working indicator of GD-LINK. The user LED should be the one under the button, in the center of the board. I was very confused. Did the factory forget to burn the program on this board? Suddenly, I thought, why not try pressing this button? A magical thing happened:

Lighting up successfully!

I didn't expect that the factory firmware burned into the board did not cause the LED to flash , but the LED would light up when the button was pressed . This engineer really did not follow the beaten path.

At this point, the unboxing + initial impression + lighting ceremony of the board has been completed. Next, I will set up the development environment and start programming it to see what highlights and shortcomings this board has .

Finally, let me summarize: the materials and workmanship of this development board are very good, but there are some things in the design of the hardware circuit that people can't help but complain about, such as the USB socket, the power supply method, and the fact that you thought it was a power switch, but it turned out to be a switch for switching between GD-LINK and DC power supply . These designs make people wonder whether the hardware design of this board was done by an intern who just graduated from school and has little development experience.

I think that good wine needs to be hidden in a bush . GD32 can achieve a higher main frequency and better memory than STM32 on the same core architecture , which undoubtedly proves that GigaDevice has its own unique ability in research and development. However, the hardware design of the official core board is not user-friendly at all, and there is no more consideration on how to make it more convenient for developers. This will undoubtedly have some negative impact on the promotion of GD chips . I hope that the official can optimize these problems in future board design. I believe that domestic chips have a promising future!

RCSN

Come on, for domestic evaluation boards, you can never figure out their design intentions. In short, I think some evaluation boards are designed very stupidly.

okhxyyo

GigaDevice GD32307E-START Review Summary

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