“You and I both love Arduino boards, from the smallest Attiny85, to the biggest MEGA2560. However if you need more speed, more analog inputs, more precision, but still don’t want to switch from Arduino programming, there’s a elegant solution….The blue pill!
If you haven’t heard there’s an Arduino nano like board, nicknamed the blue pill. Would you care to guess it’s colour?
The best thing (apart from it’s amazing speed and overall performance) is the ability to program it with the Arduino IDE, essentially making it an Arduino.
You’ll say it sounds too good to be true and it kind of is. There is a catch. The boards can’t be programmed over USB, since they don’t come with a bootloader. (A bootloader is basically Windows for microcontrollers, it doesn’t do anything, but you still need it to run stuff)
In this instructible I’ll show you where to get the boards, how to program them and FIX the no USB connection problem so you can program it exactly like an Arduino, using just a USB serial connection.”