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#637 – CH32V003…fun! with CNLohr
Welcome to the show, CNLohr of the YouTube channel of the same name!
- CNLohr has been working on projects and a library for the ch32v003, the $0.10 RISC V part
- Dave has made a video about that part, using the official toolchain from MounRiver
- How far will you take the chip?
- Moving from knowing the arm instruction set to the RISC V instruction set
- The benefits of knowing assembly
- The CH32V003 is a RISC V part in the low end space made by WCH. CN thinks it’s about eqiuvalent to an AVR
- You can buy a dev board on Tindie (this is the one Dave and Chris have)
- Compiler tooling is done for you
- AVR GCC
- While discussing Espressif entering the market the way in which they did, CN said, “There’s only going to be one of these in all of computing”
- Community reversing esp8266 using a virtual machine that had a leaked toolchain on it.
- Compared to cc2500 / mediatek / realtek
- ESP8266 without an RTOS “nonOS SDK“
- lwip and wifi stack
- Community port of FreeRTOS onto the ESP8266
- CN worked on the “NoSDK 8266“
- It didn’t have the WiFi enabled which meant timing wasn’t critical and he could overclock it to 380 MHz
- Minecraft on a microscope slide
- Ethernet on an AVR
- Other people in this space
- igor plug
- lwusb is massive (relative to the space on the CH32V003)
- What about the support burden of writing things yourself?
- Chris made a comparision to college
- USB on CH32v003
- CNLohr already had hardware on hand for decoding and debugging the USB stack
- He livestreamed the development!
- Chris said he was not sure he could livestream, but CN said that the audience acts like rubber ducks and pair programming
- ESPUSB
- vusb on avr
- Does communicty work like this have an influence on the market?
- Padouk 3-8 cent micro
- Grainuum library (later figured out it was written by past guest xobs!)
- lufa / tinyusb
- What are the physical requirements to implement USB without a transceiver? Only real thing is you need a pullup on the USB D- line
- You also need to change pins from intput to output in the window of responding
- Can make HID devices, but everything is low speed USB (1.5 Mbps)
- CN built the Nixie tube controller
- On GitHub there are examples on how to use various aspects of the part
- The chip has DMA
- During the chip shortages, CN was browsing lcsc and found a 10:1 transformer and wondered if he could make a flyback with it
- Single wire debug
- Check out the CH332V003fun library on github
- Getting started
- The next few months CN will be working on getting everything to be really good for the library
- There will also be support for other (larger, more expensive) parts
- Join the Discord! (cnlohr)
- Follow CNLohr on YouTube