Electronic – Connecting two STM32f4discovery boards

communicationserialusb

We have two STM32F4Discovery boards with Micro USB's for serial communication.
Is it possible to connect two boards to allow communication between them?

Is there is any different hardware other than the cable that would be required?

Best Answer

Unless I am remembering wrong, the STM32F4 variant on that board does have a USB OTG host interface which could be either a host or device. In theory it would be possible to make one board a USB host and the other a device and place them in communication, however this would have a fairly high software complexity, and would require an OTG adapter cable.

A much simpler solution would be to utilize a logic-level serial (UART) interface, several of which are present on each board. This will be orders of magnitude simpler to support in software. All you will need is to establish a common ground, then connect the transmit pin of each board to the receive pin of the other. For short cabling runs you may be able to to operate at a baud rate approaching a megabit per second, possibly more.

There are additional interfaces which could be utilized - SPI, I2C, possibly ethernet (with external support parts), etc, but logic level serial will be by far the easiest.