8 years, 8 months ago.

Nucleo F334R8 Can the USB interface be removed?

So the board comes in 2 parts: the bottom board with all the pins, and the top programmer/debugger part. My question is, can the top part be removed?

Fully aware that this probably means that I can never program it using USB again, but this isn't a problem once the program is finalized.

But from the above, does the programmer/debugger use a lot of power? I am thinking of using it in a low power application and I'm not sure if that section will suck up power (if powering from say a battery) which is why I'm asking if it can be removed in the first place.

The datasheet for the board only seems to have the bottom board part, not the programmer/debugger part which is probably how they achieve such low power states.

1 Answer

8 years, 8 months ago.

Should work, however:

This part supplies an 8MHz clock to the bottom part. Without this clock it will start either with a crystal (if you manually populate a correct crystal, don't ask me which one is needed, might be somehwere in the Nucleo user manual), or on its less accurate internal oscillator (which might or might not be a problem). Additional problem with this, I don't know if the F334 suffers from this, but at least on some boards the timeout it uses to check if the 8MHz, and next if the crystal, is available is set back to a (ridiculous) 5 seconds. So then it will take 10 seconds for your board to boot on internal oscillator. One option to deal with this is by using the mbed-src library and changing this yourself (but would be useful to first make sure this is indeed the case for your board).

For low power you definately want to get rid of the top part, but I don't know if even then it is possible to achieve sufficiently low power. Often a custom board is required (for example due to LDOs consuming very high quiescent current since they cost 5 cents less).