CH32V003 USB Development Board

LECTRONZ has introduced a new USB Development Board called CH32V003. It’s designed for people who like to tinker with RISC-V microcontrollers. The main part of the board is a microcontroller called CH32V003F4U6 made by WCH. It can run at speeds up to 48 MHz, has 16KB of storage for programs, and 2KB of memory for data.

The board comes with a crystal installed, which helps with timing, but you can take it off if you want and use a different method for timing. This gives you flexibility in how you set up the clock for your projects.

It has 18 pins that you can connect to external devices, and 13 (or 15 if you count the crystal pins) of them are easy to reach from the sides. There’s also a light (LED) that you can control at pin PC0 and a button at pin PD7, which can also be used to reset the board. It’s a handy and versatile tool for people who like to experiment with microcontrollers.

The product page highlights that the CH32V003 USB Development Board is capable of using a technique called “bitbanged USB” with the rv003usb stack by CNLohr. This makes it easy for users to plug in the board and use it for USB-related projects. Three out of the 18 available pins on the board are specifically set up for USB functions, and you can access the USB data lines through holes on the inside of the board.

The board is fully compatible with the ch32v003fun project, which is an open-source project. The design of the printed circuit board (PCB) is also open source, meaning its design details are freely available with the CERN-OHL-W-2.0 license on GitHub. To program the board, users need a compatible SWIO programmer, such as the WCH LinkE. Alternatively, other programmers like the ESP32-S2 can be used, as described in the documentation.

For Arduino enthusiasts, the Ardulink project can program the board with an AVR-based ATMega328P device, like those found in Uno R3 or Nano boards.

The CH32V003 USB Development Board is mainly designed for development and evaluation purposes. It is priced at $5.16 for a single unit, and there are discounts for larger quantities; for example, two units cost $5.58, three units cost $6.42, and so on.

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