The Power of STM32H7 Microcontrollers

There are different cheap but powerful Chinese development boards with different STM32H7 chips from DevEBox and WeAct.

• STM32H750VBT6 – 128K flash
• STM32H743VIT6 – 2048K flash

I recommend to use the STM32H743VIT6 with the 2MB of flash memory. Please note that this is still only half of what you get with an ESP32 but you get an SD drive and 8MB SPI/QSPI Flash!

The STM32H7XX processors are based on the 32-bit Arm Cortex®-M7 core, running at up to 600 MHz. They have plenty of RAM and Flash Memory and have a FPU for fast double-precision floating calculations. In addition you also have plenty of pins (> 88) available!

It is just amazing that we can get a microcontroller board with the power of a Arduino Portenta for around 10 USD!

I am not a big fan of the STM Cube IDE and find the approach of using generated code a bit “retro”. Fortunately we can use Arduino.

To compare the processing speed, I was measuring the speed im ms to process some FFT in comparison with other microcontrollers and here is the result:

Further information can be found here

So the STM32H7 seems to be at least twice as fast as a ESP32 and this looks very promising so I will explore this platform further!