NEW PRODUCT – LANA TNY – CH32V203 mini microcontroller board by PHVX BV
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TNY is PHVX BV’s take on our Adafruit QT Py and Seeed studio XIAO bite-sized development boards but with added SMD pins for optional extra IO capabilities and a built-in WS2811 compatible LED output. The LANA TNY is a small development board based around the WCH CH32V203 RISC-V microcontroller.
The CH32V203G6 has a single 32-bit RISC-V core, running up to 144MHz, with 1-cycle multiply/divide. Inside is 10KB SRAM, 32KB single-cycle Flash as well as an additional ‘external XIP’ 224KB of Flash that can be used for program or data storage but is not as fast as the 32KB. There’s also extras you expect: ADC, timers, USB device, UART, I2C and SPI.
However, please note that the CH32 series is not supported nearly-as-well as ATmega, ESP32, ATSAMD, STM32, or RP2040 chips that have a strong company-led development community. WCH is very “its a low cost chip, you figure it out” kind of company, and while there is some community-led development it is still best used by folks comfortable with having to use Makefiles, clone git repositories, edit configuration files, etc. It definitely does not run CircuitPython or Micropython, and Arduino support is very early. It’s definitely not good for beginners!
Various code options are available, for
- Embeetle
- Arduino core
- SPI and I²C Master support since version 1.0.2
- Platform.io
- Requires your WCH-Link firmware to be updated to the latest version
- CH32V003fun
- Experimental support for the CH32V203 at the time of writing
- MounRiver Studio
- The official IDE supported by WCH, based on Eclipse.
The CH32V203 has a USB Bootloader that can be activated by holding the button when plugging in the USB cable. Alternatively you could opt to use a WCH-Link programmer and debugger to connect to the exposed SWD pins.
