Author: Scott Walde

Many of our Arduino compatible devices contain a CH340 USB to Serial IC instead of the much more expensive FTDI chip.  The CH340 is common in Chinese product, but not as common in products designed in the rest of the world.  What this ends up meaning is, it is sometimes problematic getting them working on your computer.  To make things easier, the following drivers have been tested by us:

Translated Datasheet

Windows Driver (2016-09-27)
Official Mac Driver (May have troubles 10.9 and later)
Signed Mac Driver (Should work with 10.9+)

Note that Windows 10 appears to include the driver, as does Linux.  One extremely edge case, though, to be aware of: As of this writing, the Linux driver for the CH340 does not support parity.  The STM32Duino we sell requires parity when installing the bootloader.  To save yourself hours of hair-pulling, know that you will either need to use a different USB to Serial adaptor, or a different OS, or patch your kernel driver.

Here is how I loaded the bootloader on a new STM32 Blue Pill.

Installed Arduino 1.8.5

 

Tools->Boards->Boards Manager

Install SAM Cortex-M3

Download:

https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/Arduino_STM32/archive/master.zip

Unzip to My Documents->Arduino->Hardware

Rename folder. (Remove -master, so it is simply Arduino_STM32)

Navigate into drivers->win

Execute install_drivers.bat as administrator. (Right-click, run as administrator)

 

Visit:

https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/STM32duino-bootloader/tree/master/binaries

And select:

Generic_boot20_pc13.bin

Save it in “tools/win/”

 

Set the Boot0 jumper to 1

Wire up the CH340 USB to TTL-232, G-G, TX-A10, RX-A9

USB (for power)

stm32flash.exe -w generic_boot20_pc13.bin COM4 (whatever com port your CH340 is on)

Put jumper back to 0

Reset

Use Arduino to upload a sketch to test. (Blink, for example)