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Air32F103 is yet another clone of the STM32F103 microcontroller that can be faster if needed with a clock of up to 216 MHz instead of 72 MHz for the original STMicro STM32 Arm Cortex-M3 microcontroller.
The first SKU of the family is the Air32F103CBT6 whose peripherals and hardware design are compatible with equivalent STM32F103CBT6 parts and offered with 32KB RAM and 128KB flash. There’s also a Bluepill-like development board, but with a different pinout, made by LuatOS.
Documentation for the board and microcontroller can be found in a Wiki including the MCU datasheet that indicates models with 256KB flash and 64KB SRAM (Air32F103CCT6) and 96KB SRAM (Air32F103RPT6). Since the wiki is in Chinese only, you may want to head over a post in English on Chowdera to learn how to get started with the Keil IDE using code hosted on Gitee.
The chip and board were also spotted on EEVBlog forms and some users got hold of it. One important point is that the company, named Shanghai Hezhou Communication Technology Co., Ltd. (上海合宙通信科技有限公司), also provides Air103 and Air105, but those are not compatible being based on the C-Sky architecture instead.
The users who tried the board found it to be working just fine. For example, Fanoush flashed Espruino for STM32 to the Air32 board and noted that USB and GPIO worked out of the box, with much lower flash latency than on the original STM32 or the APM32 clone, and we’re also told OpenOCD works on the board. But just don’t expect 100% compatibility as there are some differences listed in the wiki.
It won’t hurt your wallet to try the chip, as the Air32F103 development board is just sold for under $2 on Aliexpress plus shipping ($0.21 here) and eventual VAT for readers based in Europe.
Thanks to Zoobab for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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