Page 65 - ARM Based Microcontroller Projects Using MBED

CHAPTER
5

The Nucleo-F411RE

Development Board

5.1 OVERVIEW

This chapter is about the Nucleo-F411RE development board which is the board used
in the projects in this book. The chapter describes the structure of this development board
in great detail.

5.2 THE NUCLEO-F411RE DEVELOPMENT BOARD

The Nucleo-F411RE board is one of the most popular Nucleo development boards avail-
able at the time of writing this book. This is a 64-pin low-power board (see Fig. 5.1) based on
the Cortex-M4 core and uses the STM32F411RET6 microcontroller developed by the
STMicroelectronics. This board will be used as the example development board in all the pro-
jects in this book. Therefore, full details of this board are given in this section so that the
readers are familiar with this board. Further details about the Nucleo-F411RE board can
be obtained from the STMicroelectronics UM1724 User Manual (DocID025833 rev 12).
Notice that in the model number Nucleo-F411RE, R refers to 64-pin MCU and E refers to
512kB flash memory.

5.2.1 The Board
The Nucleo-F411RE board measures 70mm 82.5mm. As shown in Fig. 5.2, the board con-
sists of two parts: the smaller ST-LINK part and the STM32 MCU part. The MCU part contains
the MCU, two push-buttons, LEDs, Arduino and ST morpho connectors, the crystal, and the
power controller. The ST-LINK part contains the micro-USB port and the programming/
debugging interface. The ST-LINK part of the printed circuit board (PCB) can be cut if desired
to reduce the overall board size. If this is done, the MCU part can only be powered by VIN,

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ARM-based Microcontroller Projects Using mbed # 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102969-5.00005-7