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Great video! Some additional info I would have liked to learn for these parts: How is the interrupt controller? A full NVIC or a single interrupt with the firmware having to manage everything? Or something in between? Also, the hardware multiplier situation, 1 or 32 cycles for the Arm? How about the RISC-V ? These things, depending on the application, can have a lot more impact on the performance than just the number of MHz.

These chips might not just suddenly disapear from market, but can be suddenly changed. No notice from manufacturer, no errata, just sudden different behaviour. Might be OK for such simple MCU, but requres extensive testing for mass production, which costs.

simple and easy thanks

Jumping onto RISC-V early will be a PITA for now but the sooner we transition the sooner adoption / mass-production ramps up. Same thing with Linux in the early days...

The day when an enthusiast can just print a chip is fast approaching and I love it. You're right about using a high level language making the underlying hardware matter less, but if I ever have to implement my own compiler for that piece of hardware I'd rather have a CISC chip than either of these options and as I said, such a day is not far off.

It would be good to add some examples of how you connected controllers, flashed, laid out boards. Could you tell us anything about IDE peculiarities? You said there are no simple examples, can you share what you have done? Maybe some starting guide on CH32V003? Do you have a Git?

10 cents is the onesy,twosy price. If you were designing 10k units it would be closer to 5 cents.

I've used a some WCH parts for some experiments. Nice and cheap and fast, yes... Not much SW reference material though. Documentation is poor relative to STM32 etc.

Just my two cents, but if i don't have special needs and build a one-off, nowdays i will always choose a RP2040. I can get a knock-off board for ~2€ on AE, RPi Foundations documentation and SDK are sublime and there is no special hardware needed to program one. Even debugging, just use a second RP2040 board and upload the official debug tool to it. This is a ecosystem every other vendor should grab a page off.

I'd much rather have complex examples than just simple ones. It's in the complex examples you can get a better understanding.

i bought the same bundle and i think the ch32v203 is the real deal if the prices keep low, just different applications

Please try ch32v003fun. All the programmer stuff (reconfig from all interfaces) and semihosting with printf back through the SWD port is builtin to the dev env, along with a huge pile of examples.

I think Cortex M0 is free with no licensing fees as ARM decided to compete with RISC-V at the low end.

Thank you ... great video. So ... actually, this is the first time I've even heard about the PY32F002As. I guess I never watched your previous video ... sorry about that! They look interesting though. I was super impressed with the WCH chips when I first heard about them: First, because I've used the CH340 chips a lot, which are really useful, so WCH seems like a reputable company. Second, yes, I really do care about Risc-V. I don't necessarily see it as better than ARM, but it is an open source alternative, which I do think will become a lot more common in the near future. Possibly unintended, but the US trade war with China is driving the Chinese to find alternatives, and Risc-V is clearly on the list. So it's a curiosity, and one of my curiosities was programming in Risc-V assembly, which I'm happy to say works just fine on these boards. Third, they are cheap. And by cheap, I mean not just the chips, but also the dev boards, and the hardware debugger which only costs a few bucks. Compare this to the Atmel debuggers for example, which cost hundreds of dollars. Fourth, the ecosystem. Microcontrollers, regardless of cost, are useless unless you have a properly configured toolchain and easy access to documentation and examples. And I have to say, that for a Chinese company, WCH has gone out of its way to make this pretty darned easy for us English speaking hobbyists. There is better, but right out of the box, I was easily able to get things up and running. This is important and naturally leads to lots of 'word of mouth' community support (Arduino for example.) I suspect that your major criticism (poor availability), is precisely because everyone is buying these chips. So, I actually see this as a positive. I bought a bunch of CH32V003 and also CH32V203 boards and chips. My first project was to design my own development boards for both chips. Basically, my boards are the same as theirs, except I added a PMOD to the end of each board, so the debugger plugs directly into it (no messy wires etc.) I had no issues doing this and the boards work fine. WCH also has a line of 8 bit microcontrollers (CH551/552 etc,) based on the E8051 architecture, which are quite interesting. These are quite cheap, are supported in Keil, and also with open source software. I understand that they support HID, so you could use them to emulate a keyboard etc. I bought some of these too, though I've yet to do anything with them. Based on your assessment, perhaps I'll pick up some of the PY32F002A chips next time I place an order with LCSC, but I'm not in a big rush.

you're less confortable ordering from ali? Why? I have ordered there for many years and always received absolutely perfect products. Never had any issues with components.

What about the 3 cent Padauk microcontroller?

Another HUGE reason to be excited about RISC-V is the modular nature of the ISA. If you only want pieces of it then you can just take those pieces, which means that you don't have to implement **every** instruction available in the instruction set to be in compliance. This also means far fewer transistors, heat, power, etc. To the degree that I am able, I do everything in RISC-V now. I am tired of all of the x86 / ARM licensing shenanigans.

wtf RISC-V is already like 10 cents per chip?? i remember when these chips were insanely expensive.

From ARM website for the Cortex-M0 APIs "For silicon designs, Arm Flexible Access offers the Cortex-M0 at $0." Of course there are caveats to that "Flexible Access", but models including power, I/O, etc. are readily available.

I just asked Claude ai to show me ch32 timer code .. it wrote example in 2 seconds.. reading manuals is so yesterday.

LCSC's stock is garbage. Even if they have limited or no stock of a part there could be plenty of supply of it. I recently ran into this problem when I wanted to use jlcpcb's online tool for parts supply & PCBA of a few thousand PCBs, because they are really cheap. But alas there was simply not enough stock of really common parts of chinese manufacturers (cmps, ICs, connectors) I needed. So I ordered at my usual chinese PCBA house and all parts could be immediately sourced, no problems!

Seems like a good 'real world' comparison, looked at from several perspectives. Hyvää

5:19 RISC-V is designed to be cheap and small, not to be fast. In practice, RISC-V cores often need more clock cycles to execute the same tasks as ARM cores, especially the highest M series. This is because ARM cores have more powerful instructions that can accomplish tasks in fewer cycles than would be required by RISC-V. Unless a RISC-V core is clocked significantly higher(My guess would be at least 4 times or more), it will generally perform slower. When comparing clock for clock, RISC-V tends to be slower than most other 32-bit and 64-bit instruction sets. Edit: 5:35 CH32 MCUs are IMO beginner-friendly. WCH has their own IDE, Mounriver Studio, which lets you easily start new projects without knowing anything about the SDK or toolchain. Plus, the programmers cost next to nothing. For all series except the 003, you can use a cheap cloned 1.1 programmer that costs around 1-2 bucks. However, the 003 requires a 1.3 programmer, and while there aren't many 1.3 clones yet, the official one costs a whopping $5. 😋

I was responsible for developing "common hardware" ICs in a company doing 400 million devices per year, and it was very, very important to minimize external parts needed, optimize pcb layout, and optimize solution size, and optimize software development, with device cost one part of the overall equation...it's amazing how adding a couple of resistors or capacitors to a solution blows up board size, routing complexity, and cost, while ease-of-use in software development speeds up the development process, and may reduce software 'spins'...anyway, just to put an ! to youre discussion....oh, and we had embedded cores 14 years ago, to manage multiple I/O devices into virtual devices, and offload the cpu, and drastically reduce power consumption...

Automatic subscribe just because of your channel's name

You kinda went the wrong way about with thee WCH ch32v003. You need to do VIA Platformio with the Arduino core by CNLohr, you even get USB on the chip and a boatload of other stuff

Re. HAL documentation - it rarely makes sense to use the HAL for the simple functions available on these MCUs as the code ends up bloated & slow. HALs only make sense for complex stuff like USB & networking. The way the WCH HAL does simple I/O is a real mess. Much better to just read the manual and set the registers to do exactly what you want

For production use, a benefit of the WCH is they make a really nice & very cheap standalone programmer, which can easily be integrated into a production test jig.

Any Microcontroller in a BGA format is a no go for most hobbyists. It's a terrible design for non machine assembly. I'm totally ignoring anything to do with performance and SW support.

Thank you!

it's bitluni's fault... he took the whole stock for his CH32 mega cluster 🤣

CH32V003 has been the subject of some discussion as a retrocomputing device that happens to use RISC-V ISA. That's a hot space now for hobby projects - both the idea of "DIY RISC-V computing" which has manifested in all sorts of forms, and the fact that you can build an excellent, cheap 8-bit computer by pairing a vintage chip with a bigger modern MCU for signal generation, as is done in Agon Light or Neo6502. There's an undercurrent in the software space to try to reexamine the low-level stack and bring back user control and RISC-V understandably soaks up some of that interest. For that kind of thing, the whole point is to be able to get very hands-on with the machine and experience some pride of ownership in how it handles data, so the ISA selection does matter in a different way from building a device where the computing is instrumental to reading sensors and blinking lights - with those projects, the Puya chip is probably fine, too. For one example, the designers at Olimex recently announced a board called RVPC that is the "cheapest RISC-V computer" - CH32, keyboard, VGA text terminal output, a buzzer, and an assembly language monitor. I told them that it doesn't really have enough memory to be fun to program, but they wanted to hit a 1 Euro price point for a through-hole project kit, so the 2K/16K is all you get, and most of it will go to the firmware. They promise to do a bigger design later, probably using a different RISC-V MCU.

The PY32F0xxA series internally are all PY32F030. This means you should be able to use the additional peripherals, 4K of RAM and 32K of Flash, as well as the PLL for faster clock (potentially anyway). Of course this isn’t datasheet spec, but all I have used in projects work fine with DMA and additional flash and RAM. YMMV.

Thanks. It would be interesting to compare code densities between the cores, but that would require some effort to do right, probably require compiling a relatively large program without using a lot of HAL stuff.

In your comparison, you didn't mention power consumption. I would assume that the 48MHz processor consumes roughly twice what the 24MHz processor does. Also is it a fixed clock rate? i.e. can I slow it down to reduce power?

Hi! I've known the CH32 for years, and I haven't looked for anything cheaper since then. It's good to know how it is PY32, this is the first I'm hearing from you. Thanks. I plan to build a supercomputer with these chips. 40 years ago I built a supercomputer with 512 68000 CPUs, since then I have been waiting for processors to become cheaper, this seems to be happening now. Now the whole machine will be cheaper than 1 CPU then.

WCH is a large and reputable company started in 2004. Their chips (especially their USB chips) are in lots of mass-produced products. I've had their CH32v003 mcus in working boards for over a year now and still going strong. (not a shill, just a fanboy...)

The STM32F030 (previous generation to the STM32G030) is probably a closer match to the PY32's peripherals. This based on comparing the ADCs between the two. Curious to know - how much noise did you get on your ADC reading? I'm seeing rather a lot more than I'd like with mine and there aren't any packages which bring out the ADC supply on a separate pin (unlike the RP2040).

You're not a microcontroller expert, you could have fooled me!

Very informative. Great! No nonsense video - real engineering approach. Well done!

One wonders about longevity. Will these same parts be available in three or five years? Will the company?

Another factor is development cost. If you're already intimately familiar with a particular architecture and its tools, and can quickly crank out a bug-free design - that's worth a lot.

How many of those 500 will really work, its hard to predict

Nice video, but you way overcomplicated the process. One generally only needs a flat surface, glass or plexiglass, then you put down your pcb and tape down similar thickness old pcbs around it to "lock" the board position, but it is still easily removed. Finally, you align a stencil over it and only tape one edge down to form a hinge. Lasts for thousands of boards. Your stencil is too thin. The stainless stencils from pcbway are completely flat on their own, so no need for vacuuming.

Flash size?

Nice work

_"overpaying for micro controller"_ I bought a handful of "Arduino" boards just for $1.5 from China then had to chuck them in a bin altogether. No way I'll ever look at anything cheap. You get what you pay for. A greedy always pays twice but an idiot pays for the rest of their life.

While watching your video, I had an idea. To me this idea seems so obvious, that I'm almost certain that somebody else already thought of it and tried it, and there's some reason that it either doesn't work or isn't practical. Still, just in case, here it is: Would it be possible to make a modified toolhead for a 3D printer that could apply solder paste? So that it could be printed on to the pads directly without using a stencil. I can see one reason that this might not have been tried even if it were feasible, and that is that those people with the knowledge to actually make this are also people who make multiple copies of each PCB, so for them it would be impractical, but for a hobby-user who would often only make a single PCB, it might be a sensible solution, that they just don't have the knowledge or equipment to pull off.

Downloaded it. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate recyclers and open-source devs for a better future.

Heat stake inserts are a lot more trouble than they're worth I just mold in a hex pocket and drop a standard nut in place and print over top you can print over regular nuts or lock nuts of various kinds and they cost next to nothing compared to the fancy heat stake inserts and they are a lot stronger.. You can also print clearance in so the nut will float a bit and allow for misalignment much more versatile than a heat stake insert. Interesting design.