It supports several so called STLINK programmer boards (and clones thereof) which use a microcontroller chip to translate commands from USB to JTAG/SWD. There are four generations available on the market which are _all_ supported by this toolset:
_\*)_ **Note: Support for the STLINK/V1 on macOS is limited to 10.14 - 10.15. Due to the deprecation and removal of macOS Kernel Extensions (KEXT) there will be no support for this programmer on macOS 11 or any later version.**
Please ensure to select the correct version for your system (i686 or x86_64). The archive file can be unzipped to any desired location as it does not contain any hardcoded paths. However we suggest to move the unzipped application folder to `C:\Program Files\` on 32-bit systems and to `C:\Program Files (x86)\` on 64-bit systems (the toolset is 32-bit).
**Note:** As packages distributed via the [Debian](https://packages.debian.org/buster/stlink-tools) and [Ubuntu](https://packages.ubuntu.com/stlink-tools) repositories differ from our self-maintained deb-package, we recommend to use the latter instead (see link below). It provides the opportunity to handle and fix user-reported package issues directly within the project and is not redundant to any limitations deriving from external maintenance guidelines.
When there is no executable available for your platform or you need the latest (possible unstable) version you need to compile the toolset yourself. This procedure is explained in the [compiling manual](doc/compiling.md).
- The semantic versioning scheme is used. Read more at [semver.org](http://semver.org)
- Before creating a pull request, please _ALWAYS_ open a new issue for the discussion of the intended new features. Bugfixes don't require a discussion via a ticket-issue. However they should always be described in a few words as soon as they appear to help others as well.
- Contributors and/or maintainers may submit comments or request changes to patch-proposals and/or pull-requests.
- **ATTENTION: _NEVER EVER_ use the '#' character to count-up single points within a listing as '#' is _exclusively_ reserved for referencing GitHub issues and pull-requests. Otherwise you accidentally introduce false cross references within the project.**
- Please start new forks from the develop branch, as pull requests will go into this branch as well.
*I hope it's not to out of topic, but I've been so frustrated with AVR related things on OpenBSD, the fact that stlink built out of the box without needing to touch anything was so relieving. Literally made my whole weekend better!
I take it's thanks to @Crest and also to the stlink-org team (@Nightwalker-87 and @xor-gate it seems) to have made a software that's not unfriendly to the "fringe" OSes.
