Pim de Groot

This time something more complete. I made a small lamp with individually controllable LEDs. It uses the CH32V003 microcontroller in a slightly bigger package, a led driver you can also find in those wall sized led panels, and some buttons and status leds on the leftover pins. The USB-C connector is only there to provide power.

The software was quite straight forward. The status leds were the easiest to get going, followed by the buttons and then the led driver. A bit messing around later and I also had brightness control, and a couple of modes with certain leds turned on. All of it was done in C, with platformio tooling.

Next up is designing and 3d printing a stand. I also want to order better white leds and solder some more boards, because this version is too blue.

I got my PCB order in the mail and immediately soldered one of the 4 designs. It's a PMOD with a CH32V003 microcontroller. I can use this to connect a tiny processor to a FPGA board to do stuff that is easier to do in software.

Though I primarily made this as a design exercise. I wanted to try out the smallest variant of the chip, so I made a board so tiny it's a bit silly.

Which is exciting for two reasons. First it means that I plugged in everything correctly, and that I got all the bits of the toolchain installed.

Second, the chip is a CH32V003. This is a Risc-V microcontroller with 16KB of flash and 2KB of ram. It also comes with a bunch of communication protocol peripherals and analog to digital converters. And all of that for 10 cents, or about 10% of the price of a SAMD11 with similar memory specs (though granted, the SAMD11 does USB).

I have no idea yet what to do with them, but because they are so cheap I can put them in places that could use a bit of software. Maybe some model railroading stuff, or weird LED controllers. I might also make a small badge I can give away.

The next step is to play a bit more with the devboards I got. I also want to design my own board that will work with the rest of the stuff I designed.