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These CH32 mikrocontrollers are great and dirt cheap. I've build a small DC motor controller with them to control a toy robot: https://github.com/h0lad/MiniSpee
by NoiseBert69 1y ago
These CH32 mikrocontrollers are great and dirt cheap. I've build a small DC motor controller with them to control a toy robot: https://github.com/h0lad/MiniSpeedController https://github.com/h0lad/MiniSpeedController
The bigger ones have PHYs for USB HS, USB-C (5Gbps) and 10/100M Ethernet integrated (!). And their development environment (Mounriver Studio) isn't too bad - I didn't had the immediate urge to port everything to CMake/VSCode.
But they need some kind of pin planning tool. It's awful to use the datasheet and find the correct pin functionalities and their mutual exclusions... STM32 mastered this with their STM32CubeIDE tool: select a feature (like USART1) and the right pins light up - alternate pins are easy to locate.
They also should clean up their license mess on OpenWCH (their GitHub page). Lots (all?) of their HALs are Opensource - but the right version with right SPDX tags are often a bit hidden.
- amelius 1y agoCan you change the polarity (direction) of the DC motors with this board?
- NoiseBert69 1y agoYes. The DRV8837 has a pin for the direction. It's a H-Bridge.
- MisterTea 1y agoNothing irks me more than "check out my neat-o PCB design" and there's no schematic.
- NoiseBert69 1y agoFeel free to have a look at the "pcb" folder.
- MisterTea 1y agoSorry, but I am not installing KiCAD or cloning a repo just to look at a schematic. Since the beginning of time electronics hobbyists have been posting schematics in bitmap or pdf format. It should be in the readme.
- NoiseBert69 1y agoSorry my friend - but embedding static PDFs in Git is my opinion an anti-pattern. The KiCad (or EDA) sources should be the single source of truth, with visuals generated/exported locally when needed. If you don't like it.. well it's a free world and every engineer has it own preferences :-)
- MisterTea 1y agoNeglecting a schematic is an anti-pattern. And I never said it had to be PDF. Besides, of all the crap people shove in Git repos, a simple bitmap that compresses well and conveys extremely useful information has to be the least offensive.
- NoiseBert69 1y agoMaybe an idea for the next project: setting up a CICD chain which auto-generates them for releases. Will take a piece of your critics with me.
- kragen 1y agoThat's an excellent idea!
- sampullman 1y agoI'd agree with you in the past, when KiCAD didn't work as nicely with git. And for a professional project, I'd still at least keep snapshots of every milestone with "compiled" output. But for a hobby project I really don't see the need. It takes a few extra minutes to install KiCAD, clone the repo, and view the schematic at any point in time.
- amoose136 1y agoIt's kicad which means you can use kicanvas to view it. For example: https://kicanvas.org/?github=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fh0lad%2FMiniSpeedController%2Ftree%2Fmain%2Fpcb https://kicanvas.org/?github=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fh0la...
- jimmyswimmy 1y agoWhat an amazing tool: it loads and displays the kicad native files in a simple web browser, but moreover - you don't have to be the intermediary, cloning some repo and then uploading the individual files to a website. I wish that existed for more weird binary formats. Altium have 365 but you have to have signins to use it, and they cost named-user seats.
- NoiseBert69 1y agoOh.. I love this web tool. Thanks for showing!
- MisterTea 1y agoI use KiCAD so I know it well. Unfortunately that site is in alpha and I am unable to zoom in to see the schematic clearly.
- kragen 1y agoFor me control-mousewheel zooms and shift-mousewheel pans horizontally.
- amelius 1y agoUse Ctrl+mousewheel to zoom. (Unfortunately, it does not zoom on the cursor but on the center of the screen).
- ssl-3 1y agoIt seems that a person can also click to select an object on the board, and then use the "zoom to selection" button near the bottom-right of the viewport, to bring things up to a more-visible size and place [some of] them on-screen. Vertical panning is then accomplished by rolling the scrollwheel. Horizontal scrolling can be accomplished by tilting the scrollwheel on a mouse that is so-equipped. (Perhaps bizarrely, I was unable to discover any other way to pan.)
- gadgetoid 1y agoA pin planner- without the code gen of STM32Cube- would be doable as a website. I made a basic one for the RP2350- https://rp2350b.pinout.xyz/ https://rp2350b.pinout.xyz/ Though STM32Cube has a very different approach, handles lots of mutually exclusive features and peripherals and a bunch of extra stuff for controlling code gen IIRC.
- hakfoo 1y agoThe more recent MounRiver releases are so clearly VSCode with the serial numbers filed off. Older ones were Eclipse with the serial numbers filed off.
- kragen 1y agoBoth VS Code and Eclipse are open-source, so that's fine. Android Studio was also Eclipse with the serial numbers filed off, for example, before they switched to IDEA.
- ilidur 1y agoThe pin mapping barrier was quite off-putting to me. However I've been tracking progress in the Zephyr RTOS project and the whole line is getting better support by the day