Build a Development Board for ST’s STM32G081 MCU

Andy Brown (of Andy’s Workshop) has been a fan of ST’s F0 series of MCUs since they hit the market, and have used them for most of his project builds, but he became intrigued with the company’s G0 line, and decided he wanted to learn all that he could about the MCUs. To that end, Brown chose to design a development board around ST’s STM32G081 as the best way to get a full understanding of the series.

Brown made his development board based on ST’s Nucleo-series and went with the STM32G081RBT6 MCU with an Arm Cortex-M0 processor, 128Kb of RAM, 36Kb of Flash, in an LQFP-64 package. He incorporated all the GPIO breakout pins on the board using 2.54mm headers and grouped by port, making them easily accessible. All those pins are breadboard friendly as well, with 100mil-spaced headers on the bottom of the board. Brown also threw in some luxury features, including adding a 32.768kHz LSE oscillator for RTC use, and a coin-cell battery clip for low-powered projects.

Brown programmed his development board using an ST-Link programmer, which connects to the board’s SWD interface for the MCU; however, he ran into a series of issues with the board’s CH340G USB-UART chip. The chip was so problematic that he revised the board (version 2) and implemented an 8MHz HSE oscillator to handle a CH340E USB to Serial IC, which helped solve the communication issue.

A complete walkthrough of Brown’s STM32G081-based board, including schematics, files, and links to the code needed, can be found on his project page for those looking to recreate their own.