STM32 Blue Pill vs Black Pill Microcontroller Boards
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 พ.ค. 2024
- The "Blue Pill" is a cheap STM32 Cortex-M3 based microcontroller board. It is popular because of its price and versatility. Now there is an updated variant, dubbed the "Black Pill" with a new STM32 microcontroller based on the Cortex-M4F (with a FPU).
The Blue Pill uses the STMicro STM32F103C8T6 and costs less than $2. The new "Black Pill" is shipping in two variants, one using the STM32F401CCU6, the other using STM32F411CEU6. Both are Arm Cortex-M4F based microcontrollers.
Black Pill: geni.us/Uq3QXi
FT232RL FTDI USB to Serial Converter: geni.us/Au5r
ST-Link V2: geni.us/zqko2u
STM32 Flash loader: www.st.com/en/development-too...
Mbed OS: www.mbed.com/en/
NUCLEO-F411RE: os.mbed.com/platforms/ST-Nucl...
Note: Some of these links are affiliate links.
Introduction to Android app development: www.dgitacademy.com
Let Me Explain T-shirt: teespring.com/gary-explains-l...
Twitter: / garyexplains
Instagram: / garyexplains
#garyexplains
The TH-cam algorithm is gonna have a fun time with this one.
Just don’t mention Black Pill and COVID in the same sentence :-)
(Oops! Drat!…)
Would they cut it out?
I came here for black pill mgtow lol bye
*It's over for microcontrollercels*
Chaduino is worse, but is more popular and has a chiseled charging port
Damn
based
Its over for v-saucecels
Oh I see! When my boss told me to get a couple of "blue pills" I thought he was overstepping personal boundaries.
It's over for Espressifcells
Based and Blackpilled
Bluepilled beta's running at 72 MHz, meanwhile blackpill sigma's running at 100MHz... or as I like to say 0.1GHz!
Bluepill's respectable 0.07 GHz is a bit stirred, not shaken.
Note that F103 can't use CAN and USB at the same time; the peripherals memory maps overlap.
I didn't expect this lol
Cuts to the chase for me, Thanks Gary : )
Without trying too hard, I programmed my black pill by adding stm32 implementation to the ardiuno ide, exported the compiled binary, and used the st programmer in usb mode to program it. You have to press 2 buttons on the black pill in an order to get it into rom bootloader.
Gary, fantastic explanation! Thank you!
Gary, thanks a lot for this very helpful video. I have a blackpill (F411) working as you describe, with both LED and serial port working. I'm programming through the USB interface, using the STM32Cube programmer. I cannot get the USBSerial object to work! I'm wondering whether it's an inconstancy between the blackpill board and the NUCLEO-F411RE board layouts (some incompatible USB setup parameter perhaps). I have the USBSerial instantiation statement at the start of the program, and when run the program never gets beyond this statement. I've tried blocking and non-blocking (true and false arguments to the USBSerial call) but the PC (Windows unfortunately) never picks up a new USB serial device. Have you managed to get the USB Serial functionality working using mbed, and if so, can you post your code? Thanks again for your really helpful videos!
Once you go Black Pill, you can never return to the Blue Pill.
You can easily, but you might not. But there is also a blackpill downside is: only one ADC, where bluepill has two. So if you need to measure 2 analog values simultaneously, go blue.
@@fromgermany271 if you are not Mission crtitical you can use an i2c adc
Well done and very understandable, thank you.
I've hoped to see performance comparison instead of wiring and blinking, but at least it was interesting to know how to upload code and receive messages from MCU.
15:30 oh, yeah~, Black Pill Microcontroller Board does toggle the LED which so useful to me. :)
We started switching from Cortex M4 based MCUs to Cortex-M33 ones for our BLE applications.
Any suggestions for a good M33 dev board, could be interesting to try out for a video.
@@GaryExplains We're using Silicon Labs EFR32BG21Series 2 SoC and modules for BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). They have dev kits, but we don't use them. Also they are relatively expensive.
Interesting as always
New hardware
Thanks for sharing👍😀
Hi Gary could you make a video on ESP32 ?
Great tutorial, where are those "defines"? DigitalOut and Serial? There are probably more, where is the documentation? Thanks
Gary, you are awesome :)
Based and blackpilled.
cringe
Mbed Studio works like a charm!
what is the limitation with mbed OS and the IDE ?? can i use it fully to upload big amount of code? would this replace arduino?
Very cool explanation 😊
Glad you liked it
Just a minor correction to the comparison table at 3:10, the STM32F103C8 micros on the bluepills do have only 4 timers; 1 advanced and 3 general purpose. ttps://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/stm32f103c8.pdf
Good vid overhaul, however you require a ST-LINK V2 (minimum) or preferably a ST-LINK V2-1 or V3 giving you SWO trace for debugging (recommend the later). FTDI may work to program the mcu (extra-poor man solution?) however it is completely irrelevant to STM and debugging :/
Also the datasheet for the microcontroller on the Black Pill states that it comes with not only a serial bootloader, but also a USB one. Blue Pill only has a serial one
just picked up the 411 discovery for myself, nice to see this video a couple hours later :D. will be using it’s adcs, dma and usb to make a joystick (and that’s just my first project)
i’ll have to borrow the usb c schematic of these if i get these pcb’d
If you use STM cube, you can get most of the way to making a HID joystick pretty quick.
Nice video, keep it up, thank you :)
You don't need a USB to serial converter, the black pill has a DFU bootloader, so you can use the usb directly
What's the overhead on the bootloader?
@@charlesthomas135 non, it‘s part of the internal ROM separate from FLASH
Why not flashing directly with the on board USB port?
Serial programming is available, but not the only solution, there's a dedicated pdf on the ST website, which explains which flashing modes are available. Cheers
Anyone know how to get a footprint for the 401 version to use in KiCad? The product page has a link to github, but it's a bit sparse on dimensions and the only file I could find that looked relevant has a .intLib extension, which KiCad can't open.
Hi i have the STM32F411CE M4 i am trying to use 2 SERIAL PORTS.... one for a bluetooth module and one as serial to the Arduino serial monitor.
how do i configure to use more than one serial port on the STM32F411CE ? many thanks.
Holy god, 22KB of flash consumed with just a simple blink sketch. Is that from Mbed or just ST's default Standard Peripheral Library
Hi Gary,
I tried follwing you video
but when i'm trying to compile, I get an error mbed.h file is not found
What do I need to do?
Thanks
You can use Arduino IDE or VScode with Arduino extension, you will just need the Arduino_Core_STM32 from github. If you use the STM32CubeProgrammer you don,t need that FTDI at all, just plug the cable and do exactly same thing to go bootloader mode, the device will show up as HID
This is a viable solution. But you'll use it exactly till the time when you discover that it is cumbersome and prevents you from using some features of the hardware. With another kind of the same device you can realize a full blown ST-Link programming adapter or other kind of debugging hardware that doesn't disable you from using the full potential of the hardware or any tailored libraries like libopencm3, CMSIS, etc. including a Makefile development solution that is fast and lean. Especially when you are developing USB solutions your boot-loader is in the way. Later, when the product is ready, there is no problem to have a DFU or github.com/feaser/openblt boot-loader for product updates.
Please don't misunderstand me, there is nothing wrong with github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/STM32duino-bootloader and friends, but there are alternatives and better(or different) debugging/development solutions out there, that you will like if you touched them.
@@dieSpinnt that isn't the core I'm talking about, the core I meant is fully supported by ST and have all CMSIS and HAL. The bootloader is HID and not that old DFU
VScode support debugging using ST-link or J-tag by default, you just need openOCD 10.0
@@vitormoreno1244 That's fine. I just wanted to state, that no one is bound to an IDE and there is a great variety out there to choose from. Including different ways to connect, debug and design your code. One just has to know them.
"With the blue pill, enlarge your possibilities!"
Oh wait, the black pill is here. Well fuck. Hey at least it still has better performances than the Arduino Nano
*GARY!*
*Good Evening Professor!*
*Good Evening Fellow Classmates!*
MARK!!!
Mark Keller h
Thank you for introducing these devices. They are very promising! May I ask, how much data could STM32 pump through it?
you got a new subscriber😊
It's amazing how cheap a lot of this stuff has gotten. I remember 15+ years ago $5 got you an ATmega32 (8-bit, 32K flash, 2K ram) on a DIP-40 with a max speed of 16 MHz, and all you had was the chip. Now you get a 32 bit, 100 MHz+ microcontroller with a mind numbing amount of peripherals (and hardware floating point) on a carrier board with the ability to use a proper debugger for the same price. I can't tell you how much time I spent printf debugging with bit-banged serial because the only real UART was tied up doing something else.
From 2-3 bucks once, they are now at 8-10. Gotta love the future, and the future is now.
I know, right!? Giving away my age here, but in the late 90's early 00's before Arduino existed, I had a play around with a sort of similar device called the BASIC Stamp and BASIC Stamp II. They were PIC microcontrollers that ran a BASIC interpreter, that allowed you to be able to program them with BASIC. Those things costed $50 each in 1999 (yikes!). But, for a kid like me at the time, programming in BASIC was much easier than trying to learn assembly. C compilers existed for PIC's back then, but they were very expensive. I still have the BS2 I bought back then lol. That thing was precious to me, $50 was a lot of money for a 16 year old back then.
@@BEdmonson85 I started with a basic stamp 2 as well. The first robotics kit I got as a kid was a parallax boe-bot in 2002. I remember those BS2 modules being so expensive. Still have a receipt for one hanging around from ‘03. One of the guys in the robotics club I attended at the time was making little breakout boards for the AVR microcontrollers (atmega8 and atmega32) well before the Arduino and I switched to them because they were so much cheaper. Built a theremin like thing for a "make your own instrument" project with an atmega8 in 6th grade and nearly got a zero because my teacher couldn’t believe that I’d made it myself. Fun memories.
I noticed that you left the YELLOW jumper in the 5 V position ? Will the STM32 chip survive 5 V into it's RX pin over time ?
Yes, the RX/TX pins are 5v tolerant.
Thanks, I'm over worried with 3.3 V devices. Managed to program this board with Arduino IDE and FTDI serial.
The blink sketch uses 19136 bytes (7%) memory. The USB onboard and many tutorials from the net were not successful. There will be many fixes in the Arduino IDE v. 1.9 so we can always hope. The next version is always better.
Do you have any info who is using the STM32 chips ? They must be produced in zillions compared to the low price?
It seems there's this, nucleo, and teensy which has usb.
Can you make a video on usb mode for programing
nice, now debate facelms
Does ST have any support for configuration via Linux?
what about DFU download? only a usb cable is required, no programmer needed.
I tried it with an STM32F401 blackpill and had no luck. Was able to download to the board (or at least seemed to) but no blinky LED
Damn the comments :D
The STM32F411CEU present in the Black pill board doesn't have a native CAN interface. But it supports up to 5 I2S buses ITOH, 2 of them in full-duplex.
Hi Gary. I've for a request and plea for a video....Support for non-FOTA NONOS ESP8266-01 WiFi module ended some time ago,
in that the "eagle" based bin files were no longer included in the SDK.
There seems to be vague instruction that these bon files can be compiled
e.g. @t (python utility) and usually from in Linux.
It would be great to be able to flash the ESP-01's with the latest firmware
as it's less buggy and gives good new AT commands to the module.
I am thinking about the 1MB (8Mbit) 'black' silkscreen modules.
Could I appeal to you technical skills to make a video on this to allow the
many millions of these modules to operate at a better level.
I really appreciate all the help you give us and would love it if you can crack this problem. Thanks.
Mbed is a c++ environment! I have used it extensively with the nucleo.
@Surge Power Technologies he mentions the nucleo-fr411re which a development board that uses the same arm chip as the black pill
Surge Power Technologies
Rewatch the video. 11:45
It’s the board made by STM
where are you getting these $4 F411's ?? All the ones I can find are around 30 USD. There are some cheaper F401 and F407, no F411.
The link is in the description, I just checked it and the price is still the same: US $3.74.
@@GaryExplains thanks, I'll keep looking for a 411. I also found that a 407 is better than a 411 so I bought one of those for 11 USD. Complicated numbering scheme !
@@robertheal5137 Maybe the 7 denotes a feature set, as well as 1...with 3 feature sets in the 3 digit number?
I wish there was a version of stm microcontroller in dip package. So that i would use only documentation to program it
in assembler
I have a video that I am working on where I build my own microconroller board using a TSSOP20 to DIP converter. Here is a pic from Instagram instagram.com/p/B7VM_vTpIbT/
Blue pill, Black pill.. How do you call board same as Bleu but with STM32F303 chip?
Maybe this is a silly question, but if the board has a USB-C connector, why the need for the FTDI adapter?
options - FTDI may be much faster and USB
Why not use ST-Link?
Hi, i am building a foot controller for a friend who lost his arms in an accident and i want to know if i can use this as an hid device to control 3 arcade buttons?
I wouldnt bother with this one. Get yourself the Arduino Pro Micro based on the ATmega32U4. There are a few great libraries for it and Arduino IDE. Its VERY easy to use and you can simulate 4 Joysticks on just one Pro Micro. I have built myself a Joystick this way. I have 6 Axis 28 Buttos and so on...
@@Stinktierchen Could you please recommend a good pro micro clone because i cannot get an original arduino pro micro in my area? See this one here : www.amazon.ca/CANADUINO-STM32-Black-Genuine-STM32F411CEU6-100MHz/dp/B0844QMB4F/ref=sr_1_20?dchild=1&keywords=stm32&qid=1613106213&s=electronics&sr=1-20
Will it work with 921600 baud rate?
LDAR
they need to refine the download & flash process its taking way too many steps slowing down the learning process and potentially keeping people from keep using it, no matter what its capable of. arduino is doing exactly that, one click and its done, on almost all boards. some just need a reset button to be clicked once.
Because it's not intended for hobbyists. Doesn't even make sense, as it's quite powerful core that runs good ol' superloop with interrupts at best.
Because they expect u have a idea what is going on in embedded system.
They really need to make a red pill.
It should be noted there are a lot of counterfeit FTDI adapters floating around from the usual suspects. The chip looks the same but inside the package is a cobbled together bunch of crap(search online for people that took it apart and looked at it.). It will id as FTDI and run the drivers but give inexplicable errors that are really hard to run down.
Mostly that is drivers poisoned by FTDI, to either zero the PID/VID of the device, or latterly to inject garbage into the serial data stream. They work reliably on linux. This applies to counterfeit devices only of course.
Garbage on the screen usually comes from incorrect baudrate. People don't know data comms anymore. 9600 vs 115200 etc. DTR,RTS,CTS and so on. This was basic training when I grew up in the 70's and 80's.
It has USB, but to program it one has to jump through a dozen hoops, no wonder all the electronics I bought recently sucks a big one (meaning morons so entrenched in the past designed it so that all the advances in hardware are brought to nill). I wonder why they haven't brought back videocassette recorders or 8-tracks.
Please zoom in to your code / web pages so it's legible even on mobile phone screens
Nice video but watching you wire up that bread board is driving my OCD crazy :)
why?
@@johnaweiss I can't remember because wrote this one year ago but probably because it was messy.
Didn't knew there exists Chinese stm32 board with 400 series chip. Thanks for the info!
This thing has USB, why is the USB/Serial converter necessary?
it isn't, the M4 bootloader supports DFU on usb
www.st.com/en/development-tools/stsw-stm32080.html
That USB disconnects when the MCU restarts and it has the same effect as yanking off a USB component while it is still in use. The serial terminal on your computer may crash or at least you will have to go though the connect routine again. When you are developing, you flash and restart the MCU very often and having to clear the error prompts and reconnect every time is a pain.
@@lhxperimental only a problem on windows, I think.
You should use usb cdc to use virtual com port, else it's easier to use the normal serial uart
@@fuzzy1dk İs this possible with blue pill?
These can easily be programmed through USB via DFU
Now the costs are like 10+dollars..
Any idea why the cost spike?
If I had to guess chip shortage, our supply lines being hit by the you know what, possibly politics, or inflation. ,
There’s a huge shortage of STM32 processors right now. I bought three black pill boards right before the pandemic and the prices have risen 50-60% since then.
@@picklerix6162 Do you know who is consuming all the STM32 chips? It can't be us hobby builder/programmer people?
I don't know which evil marketing guy has come up with that kind of confusion-kung-fu for us. The originally black pill was based on STM32F103 like the blue one, featuring mounting holes, one sided component placement and a micro USB connector that doesn't fall off when you look at it at an angle.
Also you doesn't mention some "big" features of the blue pill: The 3.3V voltage regulator is very small (current wise) and you will most likely have the wrong pull-up resistors making USB-connections a gamble.
That's no problem at all and easy to fix for that price, but better to keep such things in mind.
So whats wrong with this "thing" ... should we call it Black Pill v2 ... Black Pill 401?
Thanks for the video, Gary and showing off this new toy. ...and for the follow up with all the stumbling blocks and traps of that thing:)
web.archive.org/web/20190527040051/wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill
web.archive.org/web/20190621211652/wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Black_Pill
There is no marketing guy or any marketing at all, these are all just casual monikers applied to these boards by "the internet".
@@GaryExplains Then my not so serious statement was also confusing :)
Online compiler eyh?
So what happens when this goes end-of-life and I hypothetically still have about 30 of these laying around? Do they suddenly become useless because the compiler is gone with the wind?
I think I'll keep my wallet closed if that is the case..
Wow, only you thought of that... amazing... but wait... someonebody else thought of it to... the mbed compiler is also available as offline binaries and of course this is a standard Cortex-M chip so it will work with dozens of different compilers (maninly all GCC based). I was just showing you the easiest route! 🤦♂️
Well, in that case, it's an amazing platform worthy of my money. I had a feeling that would be the case, but you never know these days. The video made it sound like it was a "locked down to vendor specific software" kind of deal, and that got me worried.. We don't need more planned obsolescence, even with this wonderful economy of scale. Thanks for the sassy clarification ;)
I recommend FT232RL FTDI as USB to Serial Converter.
why?
@@JamesFraley Experience! The FTDI driven USB to Serial Converter does what it should. There are problems with USB to Serial Converter from other manufacturers.
It's my daily work, to work with USB to Serial Converter and embedded devices.
@@UweStrempel Thanks for the information.
@@UweStrempel Does your daily hassle include reading data sheets? My assumption is not, or else you would've heard that these devices include USB Hardware and a USB-Stack is easily implemented. Nonetheless if you prefer the FTDI232/BOOT0 solution, there was definitely a good reason to forego debugging, tracing and speed of a dedicated JTAG, ST-LINK, J-LINK, Black Magic Probe or any other of the dozens of better development solutions out there.
This was not meant disrespectful, more to show the alternatives:)
@@dieSpinnt Reading data sheets is my daily hassle, amongst other things. I agree there are better solutions.
I mean if you are using a USB serial converter then I recommend using one with FTDI.
I don't want to name any manufacturers here, but some are ...
Hi gary i got every bit but what is FPU??
Floating Point Unit,
Part of the processor which does calculations with numbers with decimal points, ie. 1.234
Professor can correct me if I'm mistaken.
Floating Point Unit. It means the processor can do calculations with "real" numbers in hardware, for example 200.76 / 5.43. Without an FPU the processor would do such calculations in software and is slower.
@@GaryExplains How much slower?
"This is C"..........Looks at source file extension(cpp).......i dunno about that one chief
I misspoke. Sue me. 🤣
@@GaryExplains The District of East Texas has entered the chat.
Your Dearest Fan notoriously soft place on patents for suing people/companies.
I mean he is also including .h not .hpp headers, and the code doesn't use any C++ features so it is a tad like C I guess?
@Your Dearest Fan Well tbh .h is just a header/file doesn't really say what it's contents are, could very well be a .cpp file being inserted into main file tree and compiling as one cpp file there.
Well I just said that cpp file doesn't contain(or seems like it) any C++ features, also I do realize that you can still use a C++ compiler, and only use a small subset of features unique to it/none at all and use a c++ compiler.(especially on mcu). If it used C it would contain extern "C" {}
a little correction, you can use an sd card on a blue pill. ive done it on a G0 series mcu from st. the difference is the F4 mcu has quad spi, this is what the SDIO uses. it allows an sd card to communicate at a higher speed.
Yeah, that is why I said natively (i.e. using SDIO) not via a third interface (i.e. SPI). You can connect anything via SPI if you have the SPInative interface. That isn't the point.
@@GaryExplains Exactly. A native interface for sd cards is spi . Doesnt matter what microcontroller you have as long as it has spi you can communicate with an sd card. Hardest bit is the software although stm32cubemx provides solutions for that. Sdio uses multiple spi port to transfer data faster. It is apparantly a bit easyer to implement too if you are going with the more advanced IDE's.
Can it run linux?
does anyone know how I can program my Black Pill from Linux?
Use stlinkv2 and VSCode with PlatformIO
No wonder the company doesnt provide a loader how bad is it they have a superior board but you have to do all this twaddling around just to get it to work, where the ardiouno just plugs in and is up and running.
As USB/Serial adapter, I'd recommend the "golden CH340G" (good search term) instead, as it can deliver 150mA instead of only 50mA from that red board. While 50 mA may be enough for some boards, it is quite low if you go into MCU chips with Wifi (like ESP32 and ESP8266).
So you have to compile on a website (in which some features may or may not be free) and download to the local folder and use a flasher and use putty for console? Brilliant! I will stick with Arduino!
Great
I'm more of a red pill guy. But cool
My experience with the black pill has been very promising. For the cost, it's remarkable. A few dollars only and you get 84Mhz clock, an FPU and buckets of functionality. I have been leery of the tools like the ST-MX where I saw something like this in the Motorola tools a few years ago - these were expensive and kind-of-hard-wired you into a programming model that hid the details far too much (for mine).However the ST MX toolset enables you rather than channelling you. Initialization and start up configuration is a snap. Having spent the last few years with the PIC32 and ICD3 plus a $1,000 compiler (back in 2009) these tools are unprecedentedly inexpensive and versatile and enabling. I still have not got the ADC in the PIC32 running properly yet. It's just so complex. The ARM STM401ccu6 ADC is 12 bits compared with 10 bits for the PIC - 4 times the resolution (on a $5 board!) and with black pill and ST-MX I simply say I want the ADC to run, interrupt driven and I'm pretty much done. (well almost!)
Why not use the much better esp32 or 8266. the 32 is dual core and much faster. It comes with 8 touchpins by default. They only cost 1 dollar more at 5.00. On top of that you can run micropython on the esp32 and 8266 and it is much easier /quicker to program.
You can use those boards if you want, this isn't a comparison video between the "Pill" boards and the alternatives.
So what is the USB-C used for?
Power. It is also possible to program it via USB but I never have much success with that. See my video on the Blackpill built in Europe.
@@GaryExplains just finished watching and was disappointed in them
My black pill is stm32f103 cortex m3 so they not all cortex m4
"Black Pill" can cover a range of boards and designs, other than the board color, why would you call the board you have a "black pill" if it is the same as the "blue pill"?
@@GaryExplains black PCB ?
Robert Heal
Yep, as soon as some Chinese discover that black boards can be sold at a higher price they’ll change the colour of the board 🤣
the "black pill" with the STM32F4 is called "WeAct", and there are different versions, you should use at least 1.3, the Version 2.1 is currently in prepearation, but there are jsut minor differences.
Funny stuff: the WeAct company is warning customers that the ZUCZUG shop (which Gary is linking to) are knock offs and you should not buy from them :)
Thr black pill name was already used by a stm32f103 board. It just has some different passives on the PCB and a different Vreg or something. It was to fix some design issues on the bluepill but then "they" just fixed the bluepill anyways. All cortex m3 boards
No CAN is a no-go for me sadly ://
Doesn't seem to talk much about what the difference on the pill boards - the pinouts, for example - actually are.
Garry rocks
It costs $10 now
Using the blue pill with kiel was a pain
I have never tried, but it is easy with Mbed OS and with Arduino (using STM32duino).
переходная есть еще Blue Pill + синяя но с кнопками
Why oh why couldn't they spend the extra pennies and use an F4 version with CAN.
What are the odds that someone would use the CAN bus?
So to get this straight, let's take a very powerful embedded CPU and make it work with shitduino IDE to blink an LED. Great, now I've seen this too. Amazing, and you're going to debug your code how?
Never began
these newer microcontrollers are finally catching up with the P8X32A @80-120MHz
If I ever run into the need for more memory or more power or peripherals (like a hardware calendar RTC that the Blue Pill doesn't have), might consider spending a bit more for the black pill. Otherwise I think the Blue Pill (a genuine one, not a fake one) is still well capable for many applications, at least compared to an Arduino nano/pro mini.
Trouble is, how do you get your hands on a real one? Some of the fake ones look very real. Black pills don't seem to be plagued with fakes quite as much.
I'm not bothered by clone chips made by other manufacturers under different designations - they can be very good. Problem is when you have errors popping up and you're not sure what you're running.
These boards are arduino compatible as well. I have been using arduino IDE for programming the bluepill and its super easy. github.com/stm32duino/Arduino_Core_STM32.