Installing STM32CubeMX on Linux

STMicroelectronics has a nice little tool to plan out your pin mapping for their STM32 microcontrollers, called STM32CubeMX, but unfortunately they packaged it in to an .exe file. I first tried running the exe under wine but I was greeted with a message that it requires Java. I know a lot of these installers are really just executable zip files so I just ran unzip on it.

mkdir stm32cubemx
cd stm32cubemx
unzip ../SetupSTM32CubeMX-4.3.0.exe

Taking a look at "META-INF/MANIFEST.MF" you'll see it want's to run "com.izforge.izpack.installer.bootstrap.Installer" so I did that next.

java -cp . com.izforge.izpack.installer.bootstrap.Installer

Looking at the install directory we find another exe. Lets unzip again. This time in place (zip bomb, but that's ok).

cd <install location>
unzip STM32CubeMX.exe

Looking at "META-INF/MANIFEST.MF" we now see "com.st.microxplorer.maingui.IOConfigurator" so I ran that.

java -cp . com.st.microxplorer.maingui.IOConfigurator

Seems to work just fine.

Telepresence Robot Video

After seeing a commercial for a Telepresence robot on TV, I knew I wanted to play with one, but after looking at prices I didn't want to pay for one.

I used an Android Nexus 7 tablet for the video conferencing. A custom PCB with an STM32 ARM processor and an FTDI USB chip to connect the Android tablet with the motors.

All the code and design files can be found here: Telepresence Robot GitHub Repo