Recently a colleague mentioned that Luatos Mall was running a promotion for the AIR32F103 BluePill development boardhttps://wiki.luatos.com/_static/bom/BluePill.html). At 9.9 RMB you get a board plus an extra AIR32F103CCT6 chip. I had never used STM32 MCUs before, so I picked one up to study, at least as a collectible.
After receiving it, I quickly learned from Luatos documentation and searched for STM32 beginner guides online. I discovered various ways to upload programs. Since I had previously bought an ST‑LINK V2 (originally intended for flashing firmware to a WY815P soldering station), I chose to test using ST‑LINK SWD. After soldering headers and wiring according to the silkscreen, the PC recognized the debugger with STM32 ST‑LINK Utility. I then installed the research version of Keil (v5.23 from the netdisk bundled with the ST‑LINK), added the AIR32 software library per Luatos wiki, learned GPIO basics, and successfully lit the onboard LED. At this point I realized how much simpler Arduino is 😂. Breakpoint debugging in Keil also worked. But then I hit a problem: unlike Arduino Nano, which can easily use the IDE serial monitor for logs and command‑line interaction, this setup had no simple way to view printf output. So I spent time researching.
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