Last year WCH launched the CH32V series RISCV microcontroller series. The main selling point for those was their price which started around 10 cents and onwards. The series ranged from the CH32V003, AKA the “10 cents microcontroller” with 2KB SRAM and 16KB flash to the CH32V307 with 64KB of SRAM and 256KB flash. So far, to program them the users have to rely on the MounRiver IDE, which is an eclipse based IDE.
WCH has officially announced Arduino support for their RISCV microcontrollers. Currently, the following development boards are supported with support for ADC, DAC, USART, GPIO, EXTI, SysTick, I2C, and SPI peripherals:
- CH32V003F4P EVT board
- CH32V203G8U EVT board
- CH32X035G8U EVT board
- CH32V103R8T6_BLACK EVT board
- CH32V307VCT6_BLACK EVT board
The CH32 Arduino core uses OpenOCD for programming and debugging the WCH chips with WCH-LINKE programmer. It also includes the XPack RISC-V Embedded GCC(riscv-none-embed-gcc) that supports WCH custom half word and byte compression instruction extensions and hardware stack push/pop functions. You can install the CH32 board in Arduino IDE for Windows, macOS, and Linux by adding their board URL (https://github.com/openwch/boardmanagerfiles/raw/main/packagech32vindex…) to the Additional Boards Managers URLs, and then search and install them as usual. For more details, documentation and source code, check the arduino core ch32 GitHub repository.
