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).
I don’t see the appeal of this chip, either. Given how much easier it is to develop for the RISC-V WCH chips, this chip should be left to legacy designs which haven’t migrated to something better. I appreciate Debashis Das for covering this, but it should be more a warning than a product announcement.
Even at lower price I would avoid it by picking STM32/ESP32/WCH32.
I’m still thinking why should I buy one of these.
Don’t. The days for this chip have passed. There’s vastly better chips out there which offer more for less. I can’t believe they’re asking for $6 for this thing. Go for any of the CH32V chips–they have full up GCC support, more peripherials, and faster cores.
The CH32X033 is much better, as is the CH32V203.
it was hot few years ago as ~20c usb full speed capable cpu, now it makes much less (or no) sense. also it runs directly from 5v and need just capacitor on vdd so it is easy to make minimal usb to something stuff with it. but getting >$1 board based on it misses the original point
see e.g. https://github.com/DeqingSun/ch55xduino for minimal board
It also has broken PWM and the price has skyrocketed.
These are a very bad choice. The MCU can only be programmed 100 times and it is old and slow with not much RAM or flash. You can get much more capable MCUs from cheaper, even 250 MHz Cortex M33 MCUs.
Cheap ESP32 and STM32 boards are a much better choice. They are faster, more modern, have more flash and ram and have much better peripherals and are easier to program.
No hobbyist should be going for boards like this now.