Add Support for GigaDevice GD32F and GD32E chips

[maxgerhardt]

What kind of issue is this?

• Feature Request.
  Start by telling us what problem you’re trying to solve. Often a solution
  already exists! Don’t send pull requests to implement new features without first getting our
  support. Sometimes we leave features out on purpose to keep the project small.

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See https://www.gigadevice.com/products/microcontrollers/gd32/ and catalog for GD32 ARM-type chips. GD32V (RISC-V based) chips are already supported, but not the GD32F (Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4) and GD32E (Cortex-M23, Cortex-M33 and entry-level Cortex-M4).

The chip vendor supplies its own STM32-like Simple Peripheral Library (SPL) framework as development tool, see http://www.gd32mcu.com/en/download/7?kw=

I currently support the GD32F130C6 and -C8 versions at https://github.com/maxgerhardt/pio-gd32f130c6 with the vendor's SPL pacakge, as maxgerhardt/framework-spl@2.10301.0 (aka combination of GD32F1x0_Firmware_Library_v3.1.0 and GD32F10x_Firmware_Library_V2.1.2 from vendor), and the GD32F103RC chip (with the same SPL version) under https://github.com/maxgerhardt/pio-gd32f103, but official support would be good.

I don't fully understand the chips but it might be that the GD32F103xx chips are exact clones of the STM32F103x chips, which also means they would implicitly be supported by the Arduino-STM32 core. For other chips like the GD32F130x series, I did not find a correlation.

[maxgerhardt]

FYI: I've made an update to the framework-spl package to also incorporate the GD32F350xx series.

The framework-spl package is at https://github.com/maxgerhardt/pio-framework-spl-with-gd32 with a new example (board definition + firmware code at) being at https://github.com/maxgerhardt/pio-gd32f350cb.

[crosswick]

I would very much appreciate this - I'm looking into using platformio to program a GD32E103xx

[maxgerhardt]

Update for those who are interested: I have recently gotten in contact with motivated people who also have connections to GigaDevice. They gave us a previously unreleased Arduino core for some GD32F3x chips. We are developing this further into a fully-fledged Arduino core with support for more boards at https://github.com/CommunityGD32Cores/GD32Core-New. Contributers welcome.

For GD32 (ARM-type) chips I've also created https://github.com/maxgerhardt/platform-gd32 in which I plan a major overhaul and unification of all these smaller (SPL) projects linked above.

Also note that mbed-os has support for some GigaDevices boards now. See https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/tree/mbed-os-5.15.7/targets/TARGET_GigaDevice for mbed-os 5.x and https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/tree/master/targets/TARGET_GigaDevice for mbed-os 6.x. I plan to add mbed-os build support for these boards, too.

[maxgerhardt]

@crosswick Just for my interest, what exact chip or board do you have in mind?

[crosswick]

I'm working with the GD32E103C8T6 and GD32E103CBT6; boards are my own design and this one for prototyping: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002023908240.html

By the way - I have gotten a working toolchain together by using Keil 5 in a Windows VM, but would like to be able to work in platformio on macOS.

[maxgerhardt]

Yesterday I've added a board definition for the E103C8 here and expanded the SPL blinky and UART example to work with it. If you clone this, import the gd32-spl-blinky project folder in VSCode and change these lines to

platform_packages = 
    framework-spl-gd32@https://github.com/maxgerhardt/pio-spl-gd32-new.git

can you do a successful build & upload for the genericGD32E103C8 environment? The default upload protocol is stlink btw, but also jlink is supported. Since I don't have the board (yet) it would mean a lot to me if someone tested my platform :D

[crosswick]

@maxgerhardt alright I've gotten it to build and upload, albeit with some RAM size-related warning, but no blinky. Perhaps I can show you the terminal output somewhere?

[maxgerhardt]

Hm okay, can you open a new issue in https://github.com/maxgerhardt/platform-gd32/issues with the output and the used platformio.ini? Just to keep the discussion separate from here :)

[maxgerhardt]

Update:

Me and a group of people (@obra, @howitzer74, ..) have recently started a massive initiative to support GD32 chips in PlatformIO.

With

• new Arduino Core (already basically working, pending improvements)
• SPL support (basically working, pending improvements)
• all GD32 ARM type chips to be supported
• currently lots GD32F3, F1, F4, E1, E2 chips supported.
• mbed-os build support (F4xx, F30x, E10x)
• debugging support (already working)

And we are also looking for contributors and testers, Discord link is in the repo.

See the repos at

• https://github.com/CommunityGD32Cores/gd32-pio-projects
• https://github.com/CommunityGD32Cores/ArduinoCore-GD32
• https://github.com/CommunityGD32Cores/gd32-pio-spl-package
• https://github.com/CommunityGD32Cores/platform-gd32

My smaller per-chip repos are considered outdated with the new repos above.