#637 – CH32V003…fun! with CNLohr

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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