Untill now, I had a bad experience with my Nucleo F4. I received the board free in the Embedded World in Germany, I'm using a LPC 1769 and a "classic" mbed 1768, I really like the arduino shape of the F4 and the idea of the "side" row of male pin is really useful, but, I have a lot of software problem, the st-link serial port is not working properly, if I load the default example this i what i get:

"m runsis program runs since 5 seconThis program runs since 6 seconds. This program runs since 7 seconds. This program runs since 8 ss. This program runs since 9 seconds. "

and after 10 second it crash.

now I even discovered that the board is not running a 84 mhz! and ST saved money on an 8 mhz oscillator.

And, do we want to talk about the pin extended under the board? Who is going to use something like that?

I will stay with my 1768 for now, I'm feel luky because the board was free, but I can't trust a development platform like that.

Calm down, then update your firmware. See. https://mbed.org/teams/ST/wiki/Nucleo-Firmware

Unless you are using an old version of the mbed lib it should run at 84MHz.

I concur out of my own experience. A 5 minute update solved problems that a few hours of debugging couldn't fix. You need to upgrade the drivers and firmware regularly or you get erratic behavior, even with code that compiled and ran well just a few weeks earlier. You also need to update the "mbed official" library in your code in the online compiler. (right click on the "mbed" tab that shows below your code files in the Program Workspace and select "update"). If you do all that then code that appears to be broken magically compiles and runs again.

I done every update, I'm using Ubuntu 13.10 , so, no drivers update are involved , I did the board update and the library is updated to the 84 version. Same problem.

Maybe Ubuntu is the problem. Try with a Win7 PC. Also, the 8 Mhz crystal is not the actual clock speed of the processor. It has an internal PLL oscillator and any external frequency is multiplied internally to give you up to 84 MHz. This is not Nucleo-specific, all STM32 chips seem to work like that.

All microcontrollers faster than 16-20MHz do that. But in the past the Nucleo's didn't do the clock multiplication using the PLL, so they did run very slow on mbed. But that was fixed long ago.

I think you should perform an STLink firmware upgrade, even if you use Ubuntu.

The driver upgrade usually also update the firmware of the STlink debugger on the nucleo board.

If you did not upgrade the driver, it means you probably did not upgrade the firmware. I am sorry, I don't know how to do this with Ubuntu.

ok guys, let's try to fix it, I have 10 years of experience in embedded application, so, we can talk more tecnically about that than "update the firmware" :)

I did update the firmware to the V2.J21.M5 revision, is the firmware updating the STlink right?

Hi Andrea, yes, Firmware V2J21M5 is the latest ST-Link firmware for the STM32NUCLEO-F401RE boards. I flashed mine yesterday. So if you have done that, you should have latest firmware and we can troubleshoot from there.

I can't understand why, on a different pc, ubuntu 13.10, after few days it started to work propelly, I dont' give up I want to understand why it wasn't working...

The USB drivers on the original PC may be part of the problem. Different hardware, bios etc may have caused issues.

Regarding your earlier question "And, do we want to talk about the pin extended under the board? Who is going to use something like that?" The idea is that you can mount the nucleo board on top of a motherboard and then get access to all the processor pins for your own hardware. The nucleo is on top of the motherboard to give you access to the nucleo USB, switches, LEDs etc and to allow an arduino shield to be mounted on top of the nucleo.