Building solo

To build, develop and debug the firmware for the STM32L432. This will work for Solo Hacker, the Nucleo development board, or your own homemade Solo.

There exists a development board NUCLEO-L432KC you can use; The board does contain a debugger, so all you need is a USB cable (and some udev rules).

Prerequisites

Install the latest ARM compiler toolchain for your system. We recommend getting the latest compilers from ARM.

You can also install the ARM toolchain using a package manager like apt-get or pacman, but be warned they might be out of date. Typically it will be called gcc-arm-none-eabi binutils-arm-none-eabi.

Install solo-python usually with pip3 install solo-python. The solo python application may also be used for programming.

Obtain source code and solo tool

Source code can be downloaded from:

solo tool can be downloaded from:

from python programs repository pip install solo-python
from installing prerequisites pip3 install -r tools/requirements.txt
github repository: repository
installation python enviroment with command make venv from root directory of source code

Compilation

Enter the stm32l4xx target directory.

cd targets/stm32l432

Now build the Solo application.

make firmware

The firmware recipe builds the solo application, and outputs solo.hex. You can use this to reprogram any unlocked/hacker Solo model. Note that it does not include the Solo bootloader, so it is not a full reprogram.

If you're just planning to do development, please don't try to reprogram the bootloader, as this can be risky if done often. Just use solo.hex.

Building with debug messages

If you're developing, you probably want to see debug messages! Solo has a USB Serial port that it will send debug messages through (from printf). You can read them using a normal serial terminal like picocom or putty.

Just add -debug-1 or -debug-2 to your build recipe, like this.

make firmware-debug-1

If you use debug-2, that means Solo will not boot until something starts reading its debug messages. So it basically waits to tether to a serial terminal so that you don't miss any debug messages.

We recommend using our solo tool as a serial emulator since it will automatically reconnect each time you program Solo.

solo monitor <serial-port>

Linux Users:

See issue 62.

Building a complete Solo build (application + bootloader + certificate)

To make a complete Solo build, you need to build the bootloader. We provide two easy recipes:

bootloader-nonverifying: bootloader with no signature checking on updates. I.e. "unlocked".
bootloader-verifying: bootloader with signature checking enforced on updated. I.e. "Locked".

To be safe, let's use the -nonverifying build.

make bootloader-nonverifying

This outputs bootloader.hex. We can then merge the bootloader and application.

solo mergehex bootloader.hex solo.hex bundle.hex

bundle.hex is our complete firmware build. Note it is in this step that you can include a custom attestation certificate or lock the device from debugging/DFU. By default the "hacker" attestation certifcate and key is used. Use the --lock flag to make this permanent.

solo mergehex  \
    --attestation-key "0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF" \
    --attestation-cert attestation.der \
    solo.hex \
    bootloader.hex \
    bundle.hex

Warning: If you use --lock, this will permanently lock the device to this new bootloader. You won't be able to program the bootloader again or be able to connect a hardware debugger. The new bootloader may be able to accept (signed) updates still, depending on how you configured it.

# Permanent!
solo mergehex  \
    --attestation-key "0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF" \
    --attestation-cert attestation.der \
    --lock \
    solo.hex \
    bootloader.hex \
    bundle.hex

See here for more information on custom attestation.

To learn more about normal updates or a "full" update, you should read more on Solo's boot stages.