The Cocket Nova CH552 is a cheap and versatile development board built around the CH552G MCU with an enhanced 8051 core clocked at 24MHz. Designed for beginners and hobbyists, this board features easy USB Type-C programming, onboard LEDs and a Neopixel RGB, reset and boot buttons, and Qwiic/STEMMA QT connectors for easy expansion. Additionally, it gives access to 17 GPIOs, PWM, ADC, and touch button capabilities. These features along with low-cost and standard breadboard compatibility make this development board suitable for learning and experimentation.
We have previously written about other products built around the CH552G/T microcontroller, namely a $10 Arduino-programmable keyboard and the Turing Smart Screen 3.5-inch USB Type-C information display. Users interested in inexpensive 8-bit MCU boards may also check out Electrodragon’s CH551 mini development board based on another MCU part of the CH55x family.
Cocket Nova CH552 development board specifications:
- MCU – WCH CH552 8-bit Enhanced USB single-chip MCU
- CPU – Enhanced E8051 core (compatible with MCS51 instruction set) clocked at 24MHz
- Memory
- XRAM – 1KB (with DMA support)
- iRAM – 256B
- Storage
- Code Flash – 16KB
- Data Flash – 128B (byte-level read/write)
- USB – USB 2.0 Type-C (12 Mbps) interface for power and programming
- Expansion I/Os
- Headers
- 17x GPIO pins
- 2x 8-bit PWM outputs
- 4x 8-bit ADC channels
- 6x Capacitive touch channels (up to 15 buttons)
- 2 x UART
- SPI interface
- Soft I2C
- 2x 1mm JST connectors (Qwiic, STEMMA QT compatible)
- Headers
- Misc
- Built-in LEDs
- Neopixel RGB on pin 3.3
- Standard LED on pin 3.4
- 2x Neopixel RGB LED headers
- Reset and Boot buttons
- Built-in LEDs
The dev board can be programmed with the Arduino IDE using the SDCC toolchain for the CH55x microcontroller. Instructions for setting up the compiler along with example code documentation and hardware resources are available on the Cocket Nova’s GitHub repository.
The Cocket Nova CH552 development board is priced at $6.00 and can be purchased from the UNIT Electronics Tindie store.
Debashis Das is a technical content writer and embedded engineer with over five years of experience in the industry. With expertise in Embedded C, PCB Design, and SEO optimization, he effectively blends difficult technical topics with clear communication
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I didn’ t understand where these “17 GPIO pins” came from given that the chip has 16 pins total. I looked at the schematics in the github project. So there are 12 GPIO pins total (shared with USB, LEDs and boot button), but they’re routed to different connectors. The pin headers give access to every single pin in fact, which is great.
8051 was very easy to develop with in assembly “back in the days”. I think most users nowadays expect higher level languages. There’s SDCC for 8051 that’s quite popular, There was also a TinyBASIC interpreter which was once popular (and well suited to such entry-level devices). Not sure if it can work without any adaptation to access the serial port over USB though.
Quite frankly WCH should have increased the RAM to 16kB; most 8051 versatile boards had an external RAM of 8 to 32kB, and sometimes even a similarly sized EPROM (with one of the high address bits selecting between RAM and ROM).
But beyond usages that absolutely require MCS-51 support or tinyBASIC, it’s hard for me to find benefits from such a controller compared to 8-bit AVR which feature as many I/O that are easy to program with more RAM and flash, and even plenty with more I/O or larger designs (e.g. 32 bits such as RP2050).