You do want to make sure you have the STM32 (STM32F103C8T6 or STM32F103CBT6) chips. There are some being sold with some other SOC (CH32?). The STM32’s are in severe shortage right now.
What do your blue pills have? Or at least, how are they labeled?
They are all labeled STM32F103C8T6, sold as that as well. And I have multiple boards purchases from different sellers. The labels are of varying quality, so I don’t particularly trust any of them. But I have tried flashing other firmwares for things like USB bootloaders on some of them and that seems to work. So who knows.
Since you have several from different sellers, I would expect you would be able to get at least one of them to work. What is your flashing process? You have to install a bootloader, then install the firmware without resetting the bootloader.
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I have tried programming in just about every order with different versions of the bootloader and firmware on the different boards. I will double check the way you suggested. Bootloader then Firmware without resetting the bootloader. I have mostly been using one of the cheap ST Link clones. I have tried UART programmers I have as well, using that technique. I have a different UART programmer coming to give that a try. The thing I see is it never seems to run the bootloader. If I try to reconnect it to the ST Link after programming, it won’t connect, I have to hold reset and fully erase the board.
I used STM32Cube with a cheap ST Link clone. It shouldn’t matter which order you flash in, so long as you set it to not overwrite the first one when you do the second.
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I had success with that exact setup as well! The hard part was to get stmcube installed in Ubuntu (I needed a specific Java version) and understanding that I had to install the bootloader separately! 
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I’ve tried using the ST-Link loader and have tried Cube in the past, now Cube doesn’t seem to want to connect to the boards (I tried on another computer and am getting the same thing I guess my STLink dongles are messed up now too, somehow). I know I have to load in the firmware and boot loader separately and not have it overwrite (the boot loader and main firmware are set to be loaded into different areas of the memory, so you aren’t really overwriting anything). I don’t really know what else I can try at this point.
Sorry if I am coming off a bit harsh, I have just been struggling with this for a while and tried just about everything I can find or advice I have gotten from others and I am just frustrated by the whole thing. It’s honestly kind of totally killed my excitement for the hobby. I prefer analog stuff, at least when you mess it up it’s easier to trace.
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I’ve heard that you can hit the chip with some alcohol to see if theyre fake or not.
I don’t think any of them are real these days, the printing is extremely suspect on them. But it seems like people can get them to work these ones just don’t seem to work with the braids firmware or my setup is somehow not working correctly.
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I dumped the contents of a bluepill with bootloader+the original modified braids firmware and also bootloader+the renaissance firmware so now instead of having to install a bootloader + a firmware it’s just one hex file.
I’m not sure how to navigate the forking github + PR process. do you want these @sebastian ?
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Nice! Yeah, you can send me the file (I’ll dm you my mail)and then I can add it to the repository
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sent!
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2020202020chars
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I actually finished making a tutorial video right before you said you’d add the new files, so i did it with the whole 2 files bit. I’ll reshoot soon with the single file version and update this link.
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thanks BratAttack for taking the time to make this video it is much clearer seeing it done in pictures than text .
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This is so awesome to have, thank you!
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Awesome video!! I added it to the readme on github. I will also add the files you sent me, but I forgot how to make a release on github, so that will take a moment xD
Out of curiosity: how did you combine the bootloader with the other file?
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Easy, i just erased a bluepill, loaded the bootloader and then the firmware onto a bluepill and then set the size on STLink to 20000 (the entire flash memory 128k in hexadecimal) and clicked “save”. So those files are an image of my bluepill, and then i just connected to my original bluepill that had the old firmware and clicked save on that.
Note: there could be some slight optimization in image size by truncating it to the first set of zeros at the end. The trade-off is that you shouldn’t have to worry about erase on this process, since it’s filling the whole memory. you just have to make sure to set your verification options like this or you’ll get an error. might want to include that in the guide or something, i’ll update the video soon.
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Anyone got a source for 128k bluepill/blackpill ? looks like the one shown on the soundforce website are sold out as well…
I picked up a couple of Blackpills from here http://weactstudio.aliexpress.com/
I just followed the link from the WeAct GitHub.
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and that one works with the braids pcb?