Pseudonymous maker “Curious Scientist” has proven off the design course of for a compact, breadboard-friendly growth board constructed across the WCH Electronics CH32V006K8U6 RISC-V chip — bringing the completed system to life for beneath $5.
“I’ve been working with the [WCH Electronics] CH32 microcontroller chips for some time, and I even designed some easy circuits with them resembling my miniature breadboard voltmeter or my USB PD [Power Delivery] breadboard energy provide,” Curious Scientist explains. “This time, I picked a little bit extra superior microcontroller and designed a growth board round it. I feel it’s notably helpful as a result of, aside from the producer’s growth board, there aren’t any easy-to-buy designs out there, in accordance with my analysis.”
Whereas choosing up WCH Electronics’ official analysis board is definitely an possibility, Curious Scientist discovered it got here with too many drawbacks — particularly the truth that it will probably’t be simply used with a breadboard until you join the 2 with a large number of flying wires. The answer: designing a brand new board constructed across the similar half that makes use of a twin in-line 0.1″-spaced format and may, in consequence, merely be inserted instantly right into a breadboard.
The WCH CH32V006K8U6 itself is a low-cost 32-bit microcontroller constructed across the free and open supply RISC-V instruction set structure, delivering a single microcontroller core working at 48MHz, 8kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 62kB of program flash plus 3,328b for a bootloader. Normal-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins, together with some linked to the half’s 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC), are introduced out to 0.1″ breadboard-friendly pin headers at both facet of the board, plus a debug/programming header at one finish.
The board is designed to be extra compact than WCH’s official analysis board, and breadboard-friendly. (📷: Curious Scientist)
Regardless of being designed for as low a manufacturing price as doable, the completed board contains some helpful options — resembling a USB Sort-C port, linked by way of a low-cost WCH Electronics CH340N USB-UART bridge, plus a Serial-Wire Debug (SWD) interface. It is this latter that’s used to flash a program onto the CH32V006K8U6’s inside program reminiscence: “My board can’t be [programmed via USB], Curious Scientist admits. “Not less than, I have not investigated the chances of it but. I take advantage of the 1-wire debug interface (SWIO) for programming the CH32 microcontroller.”
The venture is documented on Curious Scientist’s web site, and within the video embedded above and on the maker’s YouTube channel. The board design, created in KiCad 9, has been launched on PCBWay beneath the reciprocal Inventive Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
