WCH $0.10 USD RISC-V MCU

[ataradov]

But they bothered to produce a video in English.

[Sacodepatatas]

But they bothered to produce a video in English.

And Patrick Yang has been very participative on Twitter recently.

[SiliconWizard]

And we don't like their allegories with animals?

[MT]

Chinese marketing is different. That's funny to us but it's just a different culture. It doesn't translate very well, but not sure they even care. I don't think they are running after western clients for their MCUs. So we take them because they're dirt cheap and we basically shut up.

Yes, all a westerner needs is a datasheet in English!   However the planet is spherical and doing a 360 west will eventually meet east like when matter and anti matter collides and confuse things up!

And we don't like their allegories with animals?

Weeeeell, im a bit sceptical to allegories when marketing MCU's as we dont know which horse Patrick refereed to, hopefully not this one.   

[SiliconWizard]

Not that I don't find this funny or also regret the frequent lack of datasheets in english, or even just proper datasheets, but I'm equally amused at how prompt we westerners are in judging others and willing to curb them to our expectations. I find the allegories pretty funny, but I don't feel like they owe me anything.

[ataradov]

I find the allegories pretty funny, but I don't feel like they owe me anything.

It is not about owing or curbing anything. We are just suggesting how they can make their marketing material better. It is fine if they want their marketing to be bad, but a minor effort would go a long way here.

It is a typical fault you want to avoid in your ads. Ads must be good enough to cause a conversation about the product, not the ad itself. Japanese ads are kind of reverse  though.

[SiliconWizard]

I find the allegories pretty funny, but I don't feel like they owe me anything.

It is not about owing or curbing anything. We are just suggesting how they can make their marketing material better.

And there it goes again with giving them lessons while trying to do them a service.
I'm sure that if they have trouble making ends meet they'll call you.

[brucehoult]

It's not only the Chinese.

Would you decide to not buy a sporty Mazda car because of how much they go on about "Jinba Ittai"?

(You should of course buy a Subaru before Toyota sucks all the soul out of them, but Mazda have historically made some very cool but affordable cars e.g. the rotaries and the Miata)

[MT]

“At the time, internally, we used the term Jinsha Ittai, which, in Chinese characters, means oneness between car and driver. One day, Toshihiko Hirai, the first-gen MX-5’s Programme Manager, started printing Jinba-Ittai — meaning oneness between horse and rider — on his business cards, and I think that’s how it came to be used externally.”

https://www.mazda.com/en/innovation/mazda-stories/engineers/jinba-ittai-ideology/

Im looking forward "to become one with the MCU"!   But most likely the device erratas and undocumented bugs and the devtools suite and funky libs will deny me that pleasure!

[westfw]

I don't mind a bit of Asian folklore in technical marketing.
Some of us remember the Motorola "Dragon Ball" CPU, and (sigh) "Peter Packet."

[brucehoult]

“At the time, internally, we used the term Jinsha Ittai, which, in Chinese characters, means oneness between car and driver. One day, Toshihiko Hirai, the first-gen MX-5’s Programme Manager, started printing Jinba-Ittai — meaning oneness between horse and rider — on his business cards, and I think that’s how it came to be used externally.”

https://www.mazda.com/en/innovation/mazda-stories/engineers/jinba-ittai-ideology/

"Kasahara remembers: “There was a moment when I was driving that I suddenly no longer felt the existence of the car. I didn’t feel any ‘strangeness’. I thought, this is it.“

Pretty much my highest praise for a car or anything else is "There is nothing that irritates me". It doesn't have to be the fastest, or the one that turns heads, or be the best in anything. Average to above-average along most axes, and bad in none, is perfect.

For me, that's been BMW "RT" touring motorcycles (1984 R80RT; 1986 K100RT; 1995 R1100RT, still in use after 27+ years), Honda dual-purpose bikes (1974 XL350; 1980 XR250; 1986 XR600 (for two decades); 2019 CRF250 Rally), Apple computers, and Subaru station wagons (1995 Legacy 250T; 1997 Grandwagon (until 2019); 2017 Outback (in USA in 2019); then reverting to 2008 Outback 2.5XT on return to NZ during COVID).

The MX5/Miata is great too. It just can't take many passengers, or much baggage/cargo, or tow. One of my ex-GFs has a 1991 one, in British Racing Green (of course). Our relationship started when I taught her to drive in a 1984 Mini. Long after our relationship ended, I taught her daughter to drive in the MX5. Both were great cars for the purpose. Small, manoeuvrable, manual transmission, and capable of cornering far harder than you'd expect. A beginning driver can get themselves into what they think is trouble, but as long as *someone* turns the steering wheel appropriately the car will get you out of trouble.

[AVI-crak]

ch347 + http://www.yaojiedianzi.com/ - we get a very fast spi flash memory programmer.
25q64 in 36 seconds!!!

[SiliconWizard]

I don't mind a bit of Asian folklore in technical marketing.
Some of us remember the Motorola "Dragon Ball" CPU, and (sigh) "Peter Packet."

And, it's not just asian. While admittedly more internal names than marketing terms made up to sell, what exactly is Commodore's "Fat Agnus"?

As to poor documentation, I think again they absolutely don't care, and funny thing is that they'd be completely right about that. The funny marketing and sucky docs do not prevent westerners to go bonkers over those few-cent MCUs and buy them by hundreds or thousands. Guess who's laughing in the end?

[brucehoult]

AGnus would be the Address Generator chip. The fat version has more pins. Simple enough.

[westfw]

I think it's fascinating that Chinese vendors seem to have started targeting American "hobbyists" - cheap development boards, free development environments, documentation in English (even if it's not very good documentation), chips for sale in retail quantities, etc...   I'm guessing it's due to the success of Espressif.  But it's certainly fun times!
 

[ataradov]

A lot of this is also because English is universal and there is a lot of demand in some places. There is a HUGE move towards Chinese MCUs in Russia at the moment. Everyone moves away from STM, since those are impossible to get. People are moistly moving towards GigaDevice because they seem to be the closest in compatibility, but others get a lot of attention too.

[AVI-crak]

We have already been allocated a room with a very low ceiling, with no sunlight.
They said: if there is not enough space, they will force you to rewrite it in assembler.

[brucehoult]

We have already been allocated a room with a very low ceiling, with no sunlight.
They said: if there is not enough space, they will force you to rewrite it in assembler.

если не Елбрус, проблема нет ))

[HwAoRrDk]

Anybody know what the ADC's reference voltage is on the CH32V003? I have been reading the datasheet and reference manual, but coming up empty-handed. I would guess it's VDD, but that doesn't seem to be actually stated anywhere.

There is an internal reference voltage available on a separate channel to the ADC, which is stated in the datasheet to be 1.2V, but that's obviously not the ADC's own reference voltage.

[ataradov]

I think it is implied from the conversion range - Vss-Vdd.

[Sacodepatatas]

WCH is going to release the WCH-linkE 1-wire protocol.

[brucehoult]

Yeah, and I immediately tweeted back "How about gcc / binutils mods?"

[Sacodepatatas]

Yeah, and I immediately tweeted back "How about gcc / binutils mods?"

Give him some time for thinking of a propper reply. He might be thinking that horses will eat carrots free from the forest and not from the market. 😁

[brucehoult]

Yeah, and I immediately tweeted back "How about gcc / binutils mods?"

Give him some time for thinking of a propper reply. He might be thinking that horses will eat carrots free from the forest and not from the market. 😁

They're legally obligated to give the source for their modified versions to anyone who they give the binary to (i.e. all users of their chips) who asks for it. And those customers can't be prevented from passing it on, putting it on github, etc. It would be *nice* if they'd work on upstreaming it.

[HwAoRrDk]

Anybody have a copy of the schematic for the LinkE programmer version WCH-LinkE-R0-1v2?

That is the version I received in my dev kit from WCH, but it seems they have revised the design in the meantime, and the only published schematic available on their website is for WCH-LinkE-R0-1v3, which is slightly different (as far as I can tell, newer version has also JTAG pins - TDI & TDO pins instead of duplicate 3V3 & GND, SWDIO & SWCLK double as TMS & TCK).