STM32F4 Discovery Board by ST Microelectronics is a feature rich evaluation board for evaluation of STM32F4 series of ARM Cortex M4 based Micro Controllers by ST Micro. Purpose of this tutorial is to give you a Quick start with STM32F4 discovery board. So without wasting time on discussions of features of this board or Controller, let's get straight to the work. Assuming you have stm32f4 discovery board.
STM32F4 Discovery board does not have any DC jack to provide direct power to it. Only way to power it quickly is, a USB cable. Get a A to Mini B type usb cable (shown in figure). Connect your discovery board to Laptop/PC using this cable. Power LED (in the right side of usb connector) should glow RED. If your board is preprogrammed it should start executing that program.
You need this software application by ST, called ST Link Debugger. This software application knows how to talk with your STM32F4, It can program target, It can be used to see whats going on inside CPU right now ! Yes it can be used for Hardware Debugging or On Chip Debugging. So if do not already have it, Download and install it right now. You are going to need some USB Drivers also.
Download the stm32f4 FW package ST Micro Electronics has provided a BSP that can be used to start working with stm32f4 firmware programming quickly. This BSP contains Libraries which are required to work with ARM Cortex M Cores, This popular library is also known as CMSIS library. The Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS) supports developers and vendors in creating reusable software components for ARM Cortex-M based systems. CMSIS comes as a part of stm32f4 board support package. stm32f4discovery_fw contains following files and folders inside it. As shown in the figure below,