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This looks awesome, I'd love to get one. Question, what's the advantage over something like the ESP32C3 and the like? Just even smaller?
Does anyone here know the reason why Pcbway stopped accepting credit cards? My colleague asked them but I recall there wasn't a clear answer. It is puzzling why they would make it harder to do business with them from outside China. Jlcpcb doesn't have this problem.
It was either PCBWay or JLCPCB, but they had a "review window" where it was possible to make changes or cancel an order. They recently switched this to be an automated review, so there was no opportunity for corrections. It could be that the card companies blacklisted them after people started cancelling orders with their credit cards, because their UI stopped supporting the feature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a much less fancy cpu that's very small. No wireless. Lower powered I would expect. But it's an MCU with something like 16KB of flash and 2KB of ram if I remember right. The analog stuff on it is supposed to be pretty good. The Anduril flashlight firmware (toykeeper.net/anduril) is a somewhat popular application that can run on it.
> Lower powered I would expect With the right software, ESP32 can be incredibly low power. Like "months on 3xAA batteries" for watching a pin with the ultra low power subsystem and then occasionally waking up and making a HTTPS call over WiFi.
I'm interested in this too. I've been using STM32 NUCLEO boards, which are cheap and capable, but even the smallest ones are noticeably larger than this. I'd love to see an STM32 version of this project.
https://tomu.im/somu.html This is an stm32l432kc in the form of a yubikey nano.
Question for the people who have used the CH32V003 or more generally WCH, either for hobby or production, what is the current state of documentation and toolchain for these chips? Positive experiences, war stories?
The impression I get of WCH and their CH32 line is it ... draws heavy inspiration from STM32.
WCH provide English translated datasheets and reference manuals. They're fine.
Their own recommended toolchain is a fork of GCC. But as far as I can tell, they haven't shared their changes anywhere. The specifics of the changes they've made are a bit beyond my understanding, though.
With the open source distributions of GCC toolchains work just fine. I've built Rust crates as firmware libraries for them.
That the CH32X035 is very simple to design for (& low cost) means I'd rather make use of it for hobbyist keyboard PCB designs compared to the RP2040.
TIL about "Charlieplexing", or how to use a reduced set of pins to drive a matrixed set of LEDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlieplexing
Very nice. I am wondering -- why have a devboard this small?
...trust me this is the best USB cord ever try it out for free, ill sell you some cheap if you get a couple friends to buy some. https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable https://phreakboutique.com/blogs/tutorials/using-your-new-ev... thats how the grift starts...
Who is going to x-ray each and every cable they buy? And who keeps track of where they sourced what cable?
TIL about "Charlieplexing", or how to use a reduced set of pins to drive a matrixed set of LEDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlieplexing
That's going to be funny when you try to make a photograph on a short shutter time. Half the display will be off!
Very cool, but what about the $ to manufacture? Things get exponentially(?) harder the smaller it is, especially for custom boards.
Looks like it only has 6 discrete components [0], and the pinout on the MCU looks like a standard QFP [1] (and everything else is on larger pads), so I think that you should be able to manufacture this using standard production techniques/manufacturers. But I know hardly anything about hardware, so I may be completely wrong here. [0]: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/0f7962d5-38e1-4bd... [1]: https://en.wik…