The Ham CH552 Micro from Ham Studios is a tiny, breadboard-friendly growth board for the famously cheap CH55x line of microcontrollers from WCH-IC. They’re primarily based on an 8051 core with just a few peripherals, together with USB within the CH552! This USB connection permits a small bootloader to run, making it Arduino-compatible due to some exhausting work from the Arduino group.
Regardless of its dimension and value, the CH552 has all of the peripherals you’d anticipate in a small 8-bit microcontroller. It has a number of timers, two UARTs, an ADC and comparator, devoted PWM peripherals, plus 16K of flash, 256 bytes of instruction RAM (basically performing as a cache) and 1k of what WCH calls “xRAM”, which appears to be general-purpose RAM that’s related to the DMA bus. And with the addition of USB, the worth appears nearly too good to be true.
Ham Studios have added an onboard WS2812B RGB LED and put the chip on a really small, breadboard-friendly breakout board with a Micro-B USB connector. There are some open-source instruments accessible for working with these chips if you wish to keep away from utilizing Arduino, together with ch55xtool and the Small Machine C Compiler (sdcc). As a result of it makes use of an 8051 core, the instruction set is extraordinarily nicely documented, and the particular perform register places have been documented so you may entry the peripherals out of your code.
The board is sufficiently small to suit inside all kinds of issues. I may see myself placing one inside my laptop computer, wiring it into the USB bus, and including some additional contact macro keys alongside the highest fringe of my keyboard. Or maybe use one as a real-time co-processor for a Raspberry Pi.
In the event you’ve ever considered trying out this line of microcontrollers, the Ham CH552 is an effective way to get began!
