Lesson 7 of 7
Flash to hardware
This is the payoff: the same design you simulated, running on a real microcontroller. Block Designer generates safe, pure-Rust firmware from your blocks and flashes an STM32 directly — no separate toolchain, no hand-written code.
Connect the board
Plug in a supported STM32 board over USB. Block Designer targets the F4 / L4 / H7 families and probes the attached chip directly, so it knows exactly what's connected.
Program it
Click Program STM32. Block Designer will:
- Generate safe, pure-Rust firmware from your design — not a black box.
- Compile it for the detected chip.
- Flash it over ST-Link / OpenOCD.
When it finishes, the board runs your logic. In the clip above, Blinky's output reaches a real pin and the on-board LED starts blinking — the full design → simulate → deploy loop, closed on hardware.
Tip: if the connected chip differs from your design's target, Block Designer detects the mismatch at program time and offers to update the design to match — so a swapped board doesn't mean a failed flash.
Where to next
You've covered the full loop. From here, Block Designer goes further than this tutorial:
- Real-Time Trace (RTT) — live, bi-directional telemetry from running firmware for on-the-fly tuning.
- Subsystems — collapse parts of a large design into reusable, self-contained modules.
- Auditable code — an optional codegen style that emits Rust reading like hand-written code, so you can review exactly what runs on the chip.
Ready to build something of your own? Download Block Designer and start from a blank canvas — or an example.