stcgal - STC MCU flash tool

stcgal is a command line flash programming tool for STC MCU Ltd. [1] 8051 compatible microcontrollers. The name was inspired by avrdude [2].

STC microcontrollers have a UART based boot strap loader (BSL). It utilizes a packet-based protocol to flash the code memory and IAP memory. The BSL is also used to configure various (fuse-like) device options. Unfortunately, this protocol is not publicly documented and STC only provide a (crude) Windows GUI application for programming.

stcgal is a full-featured replacement for STC's Windows software; it is very portable and suitable for automation.

[1] http://stcmcu.com/ [2] http://www.nongnu.org/avrdude/

Supported MCU models

stcgal should fully support STC 89/90/10/11/12 series MCUs. STC 15 series handling is unfinished, but should work with STC15F10x/STC15F20x MCU models.

So far, stcgal was tested with the following MCU models:

STC89C52RC (BSL version: 4.3C)
STC12C2052AD (BSL version: 5.8D)
STC12C5A60S2 (BSL version: 6.2I)
STC11F08XE (BSL version: 6.5M)
STC15F104E (BSL version: 6.7Q)
STC15F204EA (BSL version: 6.7R)
STC15L104W (BSL version: 7.1Q)

More compatibility testing is going to happen soon.

Features

Display part info
Program flash memory
Program IAP/EEPROM
Set device options
Read unique device ID (STC 10/11/12/15)
Trim RC oscillator frequency (STC 15)

Installation

stcgal requires Python 3.2 (or later) and pySerial. Apart from that, no particular installation is required.

Usage

See stcgal.py -h for usage information.

Please note that stcgal only handles raw binary encoded files at this point. You can easily convert common Intel HEX files with objcopy -I ihex -O binary input.hex output.bin.

BSL Protocol

The text files in the doc/ subdirectory provide an overview over the reverse engineered protocols used by the BSLs. For more details, please read the source code.

License

stcgal is published under the MIT license.

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