ARM Series Microcontroller: GD32 Colibri-F150R8 Development Board Review

　　The expansion speed of the ARM ecosystem is terrifying, and STMicroelectronics, which has boarded the ARM ship early, has tasted the sweetness. Its STM32 series of microcontroller products have a "star" effect among students and engineers, and the user group is large and wide. Faced with this huge market space "temptation", in 2013, GigaDevice, a domestic company specializing in Flash, also joined the wave of ARM microcontrollers. Combining its own technical advantages in memory, it launched a series of microcontroller products based on Cortex-M3 and compatible with STM32. Moreover, on the basis of STM32 products, it has made a small improvement in performance and function. In general, GigaDevice's GD32 series products are rich in functions and cost-effective, which are very suitable for manufacturers who need low-cost alternatives to the STM32 series.

　　However, this alone seems not enough. Now, GigaDevice has redefined a low-cost development board suitable for beginners - GD32 Colibri-F150R8, which can help users who are new to ARM development boards to learn from scratch. The board has rich expansion functions and is compatible with the current mainstream Arduino UNO expansion interface, which is very practical. Let's first learn about the board.

　　GD32 Colibri-F150R8 Development Board

　　GD32 Colibri-F150R8 is a red PCB board, about the size of a credit card. As for the style, friends who are familiar with the ST Nucleo series boards will definitely smile knowingly. There is no way, except for the color, the two are really too similar.

　　It is worth mentioning that this time GigaDevice's board finally has an onboard emulator function, which is GDLINK composed of GigaDevice's own GD32F1 series microcontroller. We can use it to realize functions such as downloading and debugging, and bid farewell to the embarrassment of having to debug through a third-party emulator.

　　The resources on the GD32 Colibri-F150R8 board are clearly divided, as shown in the figure below. It mainly consists of the minimum system consisting of GDLINK and the main microcontroller based on the GD32F150 series.

　　The GD32 Colibri-F150R development board is designed to be as simple as possible in terms of functions, including LED, Key, and Uart. At the same time, it is compatible with the popular Arduino interface to flexibly support more peripherals. Of course, if the biggest advantage of the GD32 Colibri-F150R8 development board is the GD32F1X0 series microcontroller product on board, it is compatible with the STM32F1X series products in terms of pins and codes, which allows engineers to port the code from the STM32F1 series platform to the GD32 platform without obstacles.