The 10 cent RISC V

It appears these are the same people who make the CH430 bug interface... I mean serial port interface chip for USB. I had done a fair amount of work with it, talking to embedded targets. But when I used them in production test fixtures, the techs would have to reboot the computer periodically. Maybe they could have just unplugged and replugged the USB cables, but the point is they had bugs, most likely in the drivers.

I expect the programming tool, that shows up as a serial port, uses the same driver? Maybe they found the bug and fixed it? Who knows? I'm not worried about a 10 cent processor. I may build thousands of board, but not hundreds of thousands it would take to make fussing over a few cents worthwhile.

I'm in a Discord with folk who have been using these chips for a couple of months now. The consensus is that they're just fine. Better documented than most Chinese chips, bit worse than most Western ones, but nothing dramatic.

WCH can make them so cheaply because they own the IP for all the peripherals, instead of licensing those from a third party. And because RISC-V is free, of course.

Clifford Heath