Hello there, these will be some random ramblings about Blue Pills and stuff. Not a fully written article or so. But well… when I was searching for Blue Pills on eBay and AliExpress the other day, I found that the price of Blue Pills on eBay has risen, but is still low on AliExpress. On eBay I find the cheapest Blue Pill for US$2.86, while on AliExpress I get € 1,22 + € 0,81 for the cheapest. More interesting to see is the fact there are variants with other chips, like the F030 and F072 showing up. These are variants that were sold at the original designed or the Blue Pill, vcc-gnd.com. Speaking of which, it seems they’ve come up with a redesign of the Blue Pill. They’ve also redesigned their website.

Apart from their design, there is the re-design by RoboDyn. These boards are black, and therefore referred to as Black Pill. Which becomes confusing, as when the boards from WeAct showed up, with an STM32F401 or F411, they were black, and therefore called Black Pill as well.

Now, it vcc-gnc.com has also created a STM32F411 Black Pill, using the original Blue Pill pinout. And WeAct has created a STM32F103 Blue Pill, using their Black Pill pinout. The major problem is where one version has a GND the other has a 5 Volt connection. So if you created a socketed design that fits a Pill, verify it’s the right design before putting your new Pill in there.

Well… what’s more, looking at RoboDyn, their selling offers the choice between STM32 and APM32. I’ve also seen some sellers of Blue Pills on AliExpress offer the choice between STM32 and CS32 chips. I think that’s a good development, giving the customer a choice between the original ST chip and a cheaper replacement. For the RoboDyn Black Pill, it is € 3,45 for an STM32 and € 1,63 for an APM32. Quite a difference if I may say so. Some random Blue Pill seller, which sells 10-packs asks € 14,78/lot for STM and € 13,91/lot for CKS32. That difference is much smaller, and close to what I would expect.

Another find is a Blue Green Pill with an STM32G474CET6 chip. An STM32G series, so this is a rather new chip. This board is more expensive then the usual Pills: € 15,49. I bought one so I can play around with that new chip. The board arrived yesterday, and it turned out to be a green board. Should we call it a Green Pill? It comes from a store that has some more Pill variants, in the L0, L4, F1, F3, G0 and G4 series. They also offer a GD32F103 based Pill. To put their pricing in perspective, their STM32F103 Blue Pill costs € 7,39.

That’s it for now,
stay safe, stay healthy, and keep on tinkering with micros!

Update: The STM32G4 board arrived, updated the article.