RISC-V design challenge – Get a free board, RISC-V chips, and cash prizes

A little while ago, I wrote about WCH CH32V307 32-bit RISC-V MCU that was found in a board with eight UART ports that could be controlled over Ethernet or USB, and the company has released some source code to use the board while inviting the community to submit pull requests to the project. But now WCH, RT-Thread, LCSC, and EasyEDA have joined hands to launch the RISC-V design challenge where the companies will provide a free board or two RISC-V chips to selected participants, as well as cash prizes with up to $1000 offered to the best projects. The companies have prepared 300 boards and 200 chips for this contest. All you need to do to get a chance to get either one CH32V307V-EVT-R1 development board or two CH32V307 RISC-V microcontrollers is to enter your contact and project details in this Google form by April 30, 2022. The conditions are […]

WCH CH32V307 RISC-V development board features 8 UART ports controlled over Ethernet

CH32V307 RISC-V development board 8x UART

CH32V307V-EVT-R1 is a development board based on WCH CH32V307 RISC-V microcontroller with an Ethernet port, an USB Type-C port, and eight UART interfaces accessible through headers. As we noted in our article about CH583 Bluetooth 5.3 RISC-V microcontroller, WCH (Jiangsu Qin Heng) has started to share resources like datasheets and code samples through Github. They’ve done the same again for CH32V307 with schematics (PDF only), a datasheet in English, and firmware either bare metal or based on RT-Thread OS to control the eight serial interfaces over Ethernet. Let’s check CH32V305 and CH32V307 MCU specifications first: MCU core – WCH designed RISC-V4F 32-bit RISC-V core up to 144MHz FPU – Single-cycle multiplication and hardware division, hardware float point unit (FPU) ; Memory – Up to 64KB SRAM Storage – Up to 256KB Flash Networking – Gigabit Ethernet MAC, 10 Mbps PHY USB – 1x USB 2.0 OTG full-speed interface,  1x USB […]

Year 2021 in review – Top 10 posts and statistics

cnx software happy new year 2022

As per tradition, we’ll look back at what happened during the year in the last post, and see what 2022 may have in store, plus the usual statistics from CNX Software website. The biggest story of 2021 has to be the worsening of semiconductors shortages with extremely long lead times, prices of some components going up multiple folds, constant complaints on Twitter about availability and prices. I think I even saw a website, hopefully misconfigured, showing an estimated availability of a specific STM32 MCU in 2037. This also gave rise to opportunities and board redesigns, with MotorComm Ethernet chips replacing some Realtek chips in SBCs such as NanoPi R2C and  Orange Pi R1S Plus LTS, and CH9102F showing up as a replacement for CP2104 in some IoT boards. We also got some interesting Arm processors, but sadly the high-expected Rockchip RK3588 got delayed by another year, although it’s getting really […]

CH583 RISC-V microcontroller supports Bluetooth 5.3 LE

CH583 development board

Following up on the CH572 RISC-V BLE microcontroller with 10KB SRAM, WCH has now introduced the CH583 RISC-V microcontroller with 32KB SRAM, 1 MB flash, and support for the latest Bluetooth 5.3 LE standard. The new microcontroller also offers a wide range of peripherals with two USB host/device interfaces, up to 40 GPIOs, four UART, two SPI, one I2C, up to 14 ADC interfaces, and more. WCH also offers CH581 and CH582 microcontrollers with a different minimum input voltage, less storage (256KB for CH581) and/or peripherals. CH581, CH582, CH583 specifications: MCU core – 32-bit RISC processor WCH RISC-V4A with RV32IMAC instruction set Memory – 32 KB SRAM Storage – 512KB non-volatile storage FlashROM: 448KB user application program memory area CodeFlash 32KB user non-volatile data memory area DataFlash 24KB system boot program memory area BootLoader 8KB system non-volatile configuration information memory area InfoFlash BLE Connectivity Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) v5.3 Integrated […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC