stlink VS stm32flash

I see stlink clones on ebay for $7. The stlink software runs on linux : https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink. Or use pyocd.

This one?

I did do a little bit of digging since this post. I think my distro has this set of tools:https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink

I flashed mine using the flasher included into a Stm32f4 discovery board I had laying around. Used this toolset https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink to flash the firmware. Not sure if you can use UART to flash, if that's so, you might be able to use a raspberry pi or Arduino as an interface which is far way more accessible than the stlink flasher.

Usually the better tools (eg. Segger's J-link, st-link with st-util, OpenOCD) can emulate a GDB-server to which you can connect from a gdb or from the debug session at your IDE.

In order to get into stm32 development I bought a cheap stm32 blue pill clone (STM32F103C8T6) and a ST-LINK v2. I tried to get the info by using the st-info --probe command in the open source version of STlnk tools. I pluged in the stlinkv2 connecting the headers correctly to the dev board and the boot1 and boot0 was in 0 position, no additional connection was given.

Have a look here: https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink/issues/651 Maybe you have the same problem.

So you are just using Arduino as a UART bridge, right? I've managed to upload firmware on STM32 using this stm32flasher (this is basically a mirror from sourceforge) but it was a while ago. I may be wrong but I think you don't have enough connections to STM32, because before transferring firmware the MCU need to be put in bootloader mode and only then you can start uploading FW. To put it in firmware mode, you had to set BOOT0/1 pin to either 1 or 0 (check user manual because I'm not really sure) and reset the device. After reset the FW should upload successfully. Also if you have more than 1 UART's available, check if you are using the correct channel, as I remember there was only one designated channel to do this. Hope this helped