<30 cent MCU with USB controllers, capactive touch & more: WCH's CH55X series

[techman-001]

I bought 10 off STM32L162RDY6R from Arrow a couple of weeks ago for $0.90 AUD each and free shipping.

This code don't exist.

I also bought 10 off STM32L053C8 for $0.46 AUD with free shipping.
Delivery from the USA to my doorstep in Australia via TNT ... 4 days including a weekend !

Where did you buy them?
At Arrow they cost around 3.2$.

Sorry I omitted a char in error, the correct part number is STM32L162RDY6TR.

I bought them from Arrow.com. This is TODAY, I bought them a couple of weeks ago when they were OVERSTOCKED. IIRC they had about 22,000 of them at that price.

You have to keep a eye on the prices, look for 'overstock' and pounce!

Right now on arrow.com you can buy  the following and they have 13 other STM32Lxxx mcus on OVERSTOCK.
STM32L053R8H6 for 0.4578 each min qty 10,  2,973 in stock, 1 day free shipping
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/stm32l053r8h6/stmicroelectronics

[techman-001]

I bought 10 off STM32L162RDY6R from Arrow a couple of weeks ago for $0.90 AUD each and free shipping.

This code don't exist.

I also bought 10 off STM32L053C8 for $0.46 AUD with free shipping.
Delivery from the USA to my doorstep in Australia via TNT ... 4 days including a weekend !

Where did you buy them?
At Arrow they cost around 3.2$.

Sorry I omitted a char in error, the correct part number is STM32L162RDY6TR.

I bought them from Arrow.com. This is TODAY, I bought them a couple of weeks ago when they were OVERSTOCKED. IIRC they had about 22,000 of them at that price.

You have to keep a eye on the prices, look for 'overstock' and pounce!

Right now on arrow.com you can buy  the following and they have 13 other STM32Lxxx mcus on OVERSTOCK.
STM32L053R8H6 for 0.4578 each min qty 10,  2,973 in stock, 1 day free shipping
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/stm32l053r8h6/stmicroelectronics

How about STM32L162RDY6TR, $0.6982 each in quantities of 10. Please! strict limit of 824,162 PER CUSTOMER, FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED!  ;-)
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/stm32l162rdy6tr/stmicroelectronics

[sorin]

Thanks, but this are BGA. Its not that easy to solder .

[wraper]

Basing design on currently heavily discounted part is not smart at all. It will bite you in the ass further down the road and result in higher total costs.

[splin]

How about STM32L162RDY6TR, $0.6982 each in quantities of 10. Please! strict limit of 824,162 PER CUSTOMER, FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED!  ;-)
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/stm32l162rdy6tr/stmicroelectronics

$3.835 each for 10 off viewed from a UK IP.  Are they offering special rates for Australians? 

Boy is the Arrow website painful - if you can bear to wait long enough for it's search engine to find 'overstock' and select the microcontroller tab it shows precisely one microcontroller (Renesas). Google finds the others...   

[EDIT] OK.  Just spotted cut strips offered at $.6982 - but only 1,442 in stock.

[wraper]

How about STM32L162RDY6TR, $0.6982 each in quantities of 10. Please! strict limit of 824,162 PER CUSTOMER, FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED!  ;-)
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/stm32l162rdy6tr/stmicroelectronics

$3.835 each for 10 off viewed from a UK IP.  Are they offering special rates for Australians? 

Boy is the Arrow website painful - if you can bear to wait long enough for it's search engine to find 'overstock' and select the microcontroller tab it shows precisely one microcontroller (Renesas). Google finds the others...   

Select cut strips or ARROW reel and enter 10+ quantity. BTW only 1442 parts are discounted, everything else goes at full price.  They just want to get rid off 5 year old date code.

How about STM32L162RDY6TR, $0.6982 each in quantities of 10. Please! strict limit of 824,162 PER CUSTOMER, FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED!  ;-)
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/stm32l162rdy6tr/stmicroelectronics

Except they go at full price as I wrote above.

[techman-001]

How about STM32L162RDY6TR, $0.6982 each in quantities of 10. Please! strict limit of 824,162 PER CUSTOMER, FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED!  ;-)
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/stm32l162rdy6tr/stmicroelectronics

$3.835 each for 10 off viewed from a UK IP.  Are they offering special rates for Australians? 

Boy is the Arrow website painful - if you can bear to wait long enough for it's search engine to find 'overstock' and select the microcontroller tab it shows precisely one microcontroller (Renesas). Google finds the others...   

[EDIT] OK.  Just spotted cut strips offered at $.6982 - but only 1,442 in stock.

Of course, life is so harsh here in Australia we get special rates from other countries to help us bear it!

The Arrow website is painfully slow and often won't render the selection segment for me. Different Browsers make no difference. This is a total shame as their service and prices are fantastic.

[dgramop]

I agree that ST Microcontrollers tend to be easier to use and quite powerful. The benefit of the ch55x controllers is that they are always cheap, and we don't have to wait for an accidental overstock or a sudden price drop to get a price that cheap. Even after an anomaly in pricing, STM still costs ~10c more /PC.

[GromBeestje]

I've been looking at the documentation, but it seems this CH55x chip offers no in-circuit debugging (JTAG/SWD). It's common for 8051 based MCU's to not have such features, and those that do, have limited support in debugging software anyways. I don't like a microcontroller I cannot debug.

[wraper]

I've been looking at the documentation, but it seems this CH55x chip offers no in-circuit debugging (JTAG/SWD). It's common for 8051 based MCU's to not have such features, and those that do, have limited support in debugging software anyways. I don't like a microcontroller I cannot debug.

Say 8051 based MCUs from Silicon Labs can be easily debugged in their own Simplicity Studio (free) and Keil µVision.

(JTAG/SWD)

It's not ARM.

[GromBeestje]

(JTAG/SWD)

It's not ARM.

So? Cypress has SWD/JTAG on their PSoC3 series, 8051 core. The Nordic nRF24 which has an 8051 core has JTAG. The bigger SiLabs 8051 chips have JTAG (The smaller ones a proprietary protocol C2, nevertheless, it is a debugger interface)

There are 8051-based designs that offer JTAG as their debugging interface. And Cypress seems to do SWD as well.  --

[oPossum]

My initial interest in the CH551 was to create a low cost DIY friendly single chip version of the IR Widget. The existing designs all required a USB to UART chip. I just got the pulse count mode working. There isn't comprehensive documentation for using USB ping-pong buffers, but it wasn't hard to figure out how it works. Data rate is 10k bytes/s and seems to work reliably.

[brucehoult]

I figured out the problem. I've had this problem on completely unrelated projects before as well. It stems from me having compiled on linux

As you may have figured out, I'm only really use darwin and linux, so whenever I develop for windows I get these kinds of issues every now and then. Basically, windows expects line endings to be \r\n, wheras in linux you can just do \n.
\r\n is a Carriage Return + Line Feed.

I just used unix2dos to fix that like I had before.

That's stupid. The Intel HEX file specification explicitly says that record separators can be any combination of CR and LF.

[brucehoult]

8051 is terrible architecture

one dollar STM32F103C8T6 is much-much better and much-much more comfortable for programming.

If you write in C, the core is largely irrelevant.

Except the 8051 is an awful target for C, and you get huge bloated slow code, many times larger than it would be for any of AVR, ARM, RISC-V, MSP430.

[oPossum]

PCBs arrived and are working well. Still have a bit of work to do on the firmware.

[ebclr]

Do you have a GitHub for this project, I'm interested in making the same thing

[Just4Fun]

Wanting to play with this thing I'm preparing my "Dragon" too...   

[dgramop]

I recently got back into writing code for this. I'm working on getting USB to work for HID, and eventually writing a U2FHID implementation.

I tried making a nice little USB dongle that uses the thickness of the PCB + the thickness of the ch554 to fit inside the port.

Here's the carnage after I tried plugging it in:

[ebclr]

Just4Fun I guess you try to make a complete dragon, I would recommend you to add one extra CH340 USB converter ( or even another CH552), Who can be plugged to com0 or com1 through jumpers, Those com's is very useful to debug especially if you use keil ISD51

Also, write on the silkscreen the alternate functions for the I/os, Like RX0 TX0 etc

Your 1st attempt is well done 

[Just4Fun]

Your 1st attempt is well done

Thanks!

About the secondary serial-USB adapter, I've thought about it at the beginning but I ended up that because this board can be easily directly inserted into 1-2 breadboards it would have been possible to use commons serial-USB adapters that we have already around if needed.

About the secondary function name, I think that it take too much space... but marking as TXD and RXD (as marked in the datasheet) the USART0 pins instead of P3.0 and P3.1 it is a better choice so i did.



I've just sent the files to the service, so we'll see...
When ready I'll do a "project page" on hackaday.io with all the details and put here the link.

[legacy]

One year ago I bought a couple of matrix-orbital/economy-display lcds. Paid 10 euro for each one + S/H. They are Hitachi HD44780 with an MPU attached on the back. Nothing special, but cheap and well done.

The real problem is ... damn, there is no mounting kit for installing one of them inside a computer like if it was a 5.25" device. I still have to design an STL model for a 3D printer.

I haven't found yet the time, but for sure putting the LCD inside a computer (there are internal USB ports, as well as RS232 ports) is useful in my case because it's a server, hence the LCD can facilitate you a couple of operations in the compute room. Like visually checking if the server is up and running, and if the RAID is requiring you to replace an harddrive . Otherwise you need to plug a laptop, with a serial and ethernet cable to inspect things.

It would be nice to find a similar kit. A very nice idea.

[Just4Fun]

If anyone is interested I've just started a page on hackaday.io about the "CH552 Dragon":

https://hackaday.io/project/169671-ch552-dragon

[oPossum]

Do you have a GitHub for this project, I'm interested in making the same thing

I don't have anything up on github yet. Hopefully soon.

Current firmware and CAD files attached to this post.

The protocol is "LCD on Serial" (los-panel in lcdproc) that is derived from the original Scott Edwards (seetron) protocol. There is also support for the Crystalfontz protocol that is mostly complete, and some work has been done of the Matrix Orbital protocol.

[oPossum]

My latest project using the CH551G is a Z80 SBC. The '551 does power-up/on-demand reset, clock generation, USB to UART bridge and Blinkenlights.

[Just4Fun]

My latest project using the CH551G is a Z80 SBC...

Wow! Beautiful idea