6 ms·
1.38 Millimeter Microcontroller
- self_awareness 4mo agoIt seems awesome, but I'm having a problem with figuring out how can a "normal" person use it. How would YOU use it, reader of this comment?
- random__duck 4mo agoJewelry, most likely a fun pair of earning with a few small leds. I would pair it with a 4.8mm x 1.6mm coin battery for power.
- amelius 4mo agoFrom the datasheet: Applications • Battery charging and management • Power supplies and power delivery • Personal electronics • Building security and fire safety • Connected peripherals and printers • Grid infrastructure • Smart metering • Communication modules • Medical and healthcare • Lighting
- dragontamer 4mo agoWith a 12-bit singled ended ADC? That's laughable. You can't reliably measure current with this thing. I'm not seeing any voltage comparators which are really useful for most of those use cases... Now the MSPM0 series chips have a few OpAmps or a few better ADCs. TI also have proper power metering chips with 16-bit or 24-bit (!!!!!) ADCs for proper power metering. --------- This is still a 12-bit ADC strapped onto a 8-pin chip. It's useful for something but not that whole list. Power metering? Heh, TI is smoking something or just using AI auto complete. > Battery charging and management > Power supplies and power delivery > • Grid infrastructure Those really want a comparator (100ns response time) rather than an ADC (10,000ns response time). You also want zero-crossing detectors on grid infra, or other analog features that simply aren't available at this price point. Just no. > • Smart metering Lol very no. 16-bit ADC at a minimum, probably needs 24-bit delta sigma ADC instead (slower ADC but higher precision). TI has a bunch of MSP430 that do the job well. Alternatively, an OpAmp or other amplifier can zoom into the current sensing circuits and make a 12-bit ADC work, but you need another bigger chip (the OpAmp), at which point you should be using an OpAmp+MCU solution instead. Plus the "smart" part of metering needs a better communication module than bare bones basic UART. Maybe wireless of some kind or a DSP for custom modem work. > • Communication modules Just no. Waayyyyyyy to slow. > • Personal electronics > • Connected peripherals and printers You have bigger, better chips for these. > • Building security and fire safety > • Medical and healthcare > • Lighting I think these three are legitimate good use cases.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo agoIt's got a UART, it's got a PWM, it's really fast, and it's got masses of memory. I'd build a really tiny synthesizer, port my Juno 106 plugin's voice engine to it. But like *really* tiny.
- aa-jv 4mo ago"Masses" of memory, it does not have. Sufficient to the task for synthesis? Maybe, if you do a fair bit of assembly ..
- dofm 4mo agoI don't know anything about synths, but the M0 architecture is designed to run the program out of flash, I think? So 16KB is quite a bit. 1KB is surely enough to store synthesizer patches. Several, probably.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo agoYou need a few dozen bytes of storage per voice, like four bytes for the phase accumulator (uint32_t), another four for the current pitch offset that gets added, and so on. It all adds up, especially if you want to implement a ladder filter properly.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo agoIt's got 16kB of flash and 1kB of RAM, that's plenty.
- dragontamer 4mo agoThe original Intel 8051 was 4k EROM and 128B of RAM and set the world on fire with its applications. 16kB Flash and 1kB SRAM is plenty. ------- However, the analog capabilities of this thing are nearly trash. One ADC?? No comparators? No OpAmps? Ehhhhhhhh, this is really bare bones by modern standards. Modern cheap chips differentiate themselves with how many analog components they stuff into one package so that they are easily used in a wide variety of situations. The only real feature offered here is size. Which is impressive but definitely limiting compared to the rest of TI's MSPM0 (or even MSP430) lineup. The best this MSPM0-C seems to be able to do, is ADC input -> PWM output. Which is... the bare minimum necessary for mixed signal control. Resistor+capacitor for anti aliasing on input, resistor+capacitor (smooth the PWM) + transistor for output, and yeah we have a true system with feedback here. But it won't be as reliable or quick as other tools (comparators, OpAmps, or the like)
- adrian_b 4mo agoI have used a microcontroller from ST, very similar in size and also with a Cortex-M0+ core. The applications required only I2C to communicate with a bunch of other integrated circuits and a few general-purpose pins. An example of an application was a kind of hardware video converter, which received video input from a camera and then sent it wirelessly or on cables, where the MCU configured and reconfigured everything on the board, after reset or when certain buttons were pressed, and the configuration for some things, like a HDMI transmitter, was complicated, requiring the reading and the writing of many internal registers via I2C, so a MCU was really needed. There are many types of complex integrated circuits that need to be configured with values written in internal registers to be usable, so, even if just for the initial configuration after reset, you need some small MCU that can write the registers via I2C or SPI. For this, the smaller the MCU is, so it will not take space on the PCB just for booting the other ICs, the better.
- emil-lp 4mo agoI'd buy it and put it in the Drawer of Dreams aka unfinished projects.
- alex_suzuki 4mo agoWhat a nice name for that particular box that keeps on growing and growing. Mine is called Why did I buy this, again?
- wang_li 4mo agoWhat even are these things?
- nickcw 4mo agoHa! I'm going to rename my home office "The Room of Dreams"
- aeve890 4mo agoDoD in short, to make it look like serious business
- wongarsu 4mo agoAnything where a reasonable person would say "this doesn't even need a microcontroller, just do it analog". In terms of projects that I would be inclined to try that are uniquely enabled by this, my mind goes towards wearables. It's small enough to be hidden in seams of fabric. If you wanted to have a bunch of temperature sensors all over your body, or have a complex arrangement of dimmable LEDs woven into clothing, each string going to its own controller hidden close by and communicating with a central controller, or maybe measure your skin conductivity all over your body or something, this is a great piece of tech to do that with style. You still need to run power and data wires everywhere (no RF on this chip), but flexible wires are a very solvable problem.
- NichoPaolucci 4mo agoI understand they put "normal" person in quotes, probably to reference the HN crowd or other computer enthusiasts - but it is very funny to think of my Uncle Rick (No smartphone, no computer knowledge), a "normal" person, coming to the family outing with microcontrollers rigged up to temperature sensors all over his body.
- dvh 4mo agoI have action camera with retarded user interface. To turn it on I have to: press main button for at least 0.3s but no longer than 2s, then I have to wait until it beeps, then I have to wait for 3s, then I have to press second button for at least 0.3s but no longer than 1s. Then I observe main led, if it blinks the camera is recording, if not I need to press second button again. With tiny mcu like this one, I think it would be possible to add a bodge inside that would turn on recording automatically after single press of button. The MCU needs to be really tiny to fit inside camera.
- benj111 4mo agoCheck out projects for the ch32 line of chips. It's basically a risc V equivalent of this, except the size.
- richardw 4mo agoI made something to ping an AWS service to tell me the uptime of my internet connection. The idea was to sprinkle them around our area, connected to various home WiFi’s, and get a better triangulation of outages. Eg is whole pipe out, just one ISP etc. I made and tested it but didn’t care enough to continue.
- analog31 4mo agoConsumer electronics can be designed to extremely tight budgets for cost and power consumption. Designers will choose a chip based on a chip having precisely the features needed, zero current wasted on features they don't need, and seemingly tiny price differences.
- 15155 4mo agoPower sequencing or such in mobile electronics, using a pick-and-place machine. This specific SKU has serious limitations due to the SRAM - TI limits the features (ROM bootloader IIRC, etc.) severely on these due to this.
- mrheosuper 4mo agoYou write program(usually in C), compile it into machine code(to .hex or .bin file), then "flashing" it using debugger tool. This IC will execute your program.
- ndiddy 4mo agoIt's not intended for a normal person to use. If you're a normal person making something as a hobby project, you'll get a much nicer development experience by using a microcontroller that costs a few dollars rather than a few cents. For hobby purposes, I recommend either the Raspberry Pi Pico or the STM32 blue pill. A part like this is intended for inexpensive, high-volume consumer electronics that need some sort of simple control functionality. For example, let's say you're making an electric toothbrush. All it needs to do is turn the motor on, wait for 2 minutes, then pulse the motor to let the user know they're done brushing their teeth. This can do that. Or let's say you're making a promotional keychain, and you want it to blink a few LEDs in a specific pattern when the user presses a button. This can do that. If you take apart basically any piece of cheap (< $5) electronics that's been designed in the past 10-15 years, you'll usually see a tiny unmarked 8-pin microcontroller doing the control work. This part competes in that market.
- dragontamer 4mo agoAnyone using these small chips for hobbyist purposes probably should look at the more fully featured MSPM0-L line or MSPM0-G lines. Still Cortex-M0+ and in the sub $2 market... But hobbyists probably don't see much cost benefit below that (how many MCUs are you buying anyway??). The L line and G lines have better ADCs, Comparators, better connectivity, and some of them even have on board OpAmps. Tiny chips have a use of you are tying to build the absolute smallest devices. But hobbyists don't have the equipment to comfortably build things of this size. Sizing up to VQFN packages and 0603 passives makes more sense for the typical hobbyist. ----------- As far as how a professional would use this, there are plenty of good uses of chips inside of cables or other kinds of smarts. Like a chip controlling a bunch of LEDs for example, based on voltage measurements elsewhere (there is a 12-bit ADC after all, which means you have rather solid voltage sensing from a few pins). Basic voltage comparisons + math + crude timer and then a few pins for in/out gets you to a lot of useful projects. Albeit dumb ones. I dunno why anything needs to be this small in particular though.
- LoganDark 4mo agoCould you put a few thousand of these on a PCB and have a super duper tiny compute cluster?
- emil-lp 4mo agoYou mean ... Like a Beowulf cluster of those?
- LoganDark 4mo agoYeah, exactly!
- myrmidon 4mo agoYes, if you want all the drawbacks of distributed computing with none of the advantages: You'd probably be stuck with something UART based as interconnect, Every core is gonna have way too little RAM to do anything useful, you are missing like half the instruction set (floating point operations in software), and power draw at 4mW minimum per core adds up quickly to something that an efficient laptop-CPU would use. On top of all this, latency for anything is gonna be abysmal because the cores are so slow... I honestly don't see an application where this is even close to desirable. Would be fun, tough, to have a 10-stack of PCBs with 10 by 10 CPUs each for a thousand cores (=> ~4W power @1.8V).
- aa-jv 4mo agoMaybe not practical as a cluster configuration, but it could certainly be used as a voice-generating device for a synthesizer, or as a controlling device for MIDI I/O, or .. both even of course, configurable according to the users needs/patch idea.
- myrmidon 4mo agoYeah, but even for those applications you suffer from limited RAM a lot; with 16bit samples at 48kHz the thing has 10ms of audio buffer (stereo: 5ms) if you don't need RAM for anything else :S The ADC is really nice though, 1.5 MSPS is really good for such a small/low powered thing (fills the whole RAM in under half a millisecond).
- ant6n 4mo agoIt's a bit low on RAM, otherwise it's similar to a game boy advance. Maybe after the GBA, GBA SP, and GBA micro, it's time for a GBA.. nano?
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoNintendo releasing a new GB would be wild and awesome. Unfortunately it'd likely be overpowered and emulate games they downloaded off ROM sites themselves. They'd be done already if they bought up or licensed Analogue though.
- nopurpose 4mo agoCan it run Prince of Persia?
- londons_explore 4mo agoWith a lot of code-golf, I would guess the answer is yes.
- arnejenssen 4mo agoA silly question (from a non-HW guy). Why are digital bathroom scales so coarse? Some have a weight resolution of +/- 500 grams. Would a better microcontroller make a weight faster or more presise? I guess this TI micro controller is overkill for a bathroom scale.
- lukan 4mo agoNot an expert here, but I doubt it is related to processing power, but quality of the sensor.
- HackerThemAll 4mo ago> this TI micro controller is overkill for a bathroom scale For majority of use cases nowadays it's much easier to use a programmable chip than invent a complex device using discrete analog electronic parts.
- yoggodoggo 4mo agoIt's down to the quality of the sensor, the quality of the ADC translating the signals from the sensor, and the implementation of the software that deals with the ADC translation.
- myrmidon 4mo agoHigher resolution would let the user see that your scale is zeroed badly, that repeatability sucks and that the measured weight is not even constant under a constant load. Decreasing resolution hides all of those.
- jmiskovic 4mo agoComputing power is crazy cheap and does not help. The perceived slowness is because the taken measurements are averaged over second or so. When you step on the scale your weight shifts around and that affects the measurement by far more than half a kg. Averaging gives you better accuracy and more confidence in the result but it doesn't improve the measurement precision. The scale precision comes from calibration of the measuring mechanism done on factory line at certain weights. If your specific body weight is far from the weights used in calibration, or too much time passed, then the calibration doesn't help much. A better microcontroller doesn't help at all. Even a cheapest uC from decades ago is good enough. Better ADC and gauge sensor would help, but even more important is good analog engineering to produce self-correcting circuits with decent noise rejection. In general this category of products is more for tracking changes in your body weight than getting the precise absolute value. And the body weight changes a lot just from hydration level, so the ±.5kg tolerance is considered good enough.
- 7734128 4mo agoDoes anyone know what would the price of this be, roughly of course, given that a customer ordered some thousands or tens of thousands? I have no grasp of even the magnitude of the price for something like this.
- myrmidon 4mo agoNo more than 50 cents per CPU for this one. Can get under 10 cents each for cheap minimalistic CPUs in high numbers.
- Karliss 4mo agoThe prices are right there if you click "ordering & quality". $0.19-0.23 depending on exact variant at quantities of 1000 and up. $0.6 for 1-99 although that will likely vary a lot if you are buying through a distributor instead of directly.
- zipy124 4mo agoPrice is listed on the site, the most expensive version is: 1-99 $0.720 100-249 $0.48925 0-999 $0.378 1,000+ $0.251
- 7734128 4mo agoOh, I'm an idiot who didn't see that at all. Thanks.
- anonli 4mo agoAt $0.20 in 1k quantities, this is TI's answer to the CH32V003, Puya PY32, and the STM32C0 series. It's great to see tier-1 silicon vendors participating in the race to the bottom for jellybean microcontrollers. The 1KB of SRAM is admittedly very tight (even WCH's 10-cent RISC-V parts usually give you 2KB), so you are strictly in bare-metal, carefully-managing-your-stack territory.
- Karliss 4mo ago1KB isn't so bad unless you are making something complicated or need large buffers. You can do quite a bit of nontrivial stuff with it. Years ago I made universal remote with ATtiny13 + external EEPROM for storing remote data. It has only 64 bytes of RAM, that's what I would call very tight. Was still able to program it in C, 1KB flash and number of pins were bigger limiting factor than ram. Plenty of DIY projects used ATtiny2313 with V-USB. That's a pure software USB implementation bit banging the IO pins (not a USB stack on top of hardware USB support)+ your application logic squeezed into 2K of flash + 128 bytes of ram. Chips like this are great for digital glue logic. Read a sensor, read a button press, blink some LEDs with simple state machine or control loop.
- LeifCarrotson 4mo agoYes, that's "bare metal" as opposed to programming in MicroPython, Javascript with Espruino, Lua/NodeMCU, Rust, or adding your C application on top of an off-the-shelf RTOS. C support is basically universal these days, very few chips require you to program in only assembly anymore.
- daveguy 4mo agoRust compiles to bare metal (assembly aka machine instruction code), just like C does.
- chlorion 4mo agoIt also supports running in freestanding setups without an OS, and quite a lot of the language's features still work. I was extremely surprised by how much functionality is packed into "core", and runs without an OS when using freestanding rust. Even stuff that requires an allocator can run provided you provide your own heap! A cool example of this was implementing fmt::Write for a memory mapped uart console thing. Then implementing a kprintln! macro that supports all of the formatting machinery that you are use to. This worked without even a heap available.
- emctech 4mo agoThis line of micros has been out for almost 2 years now but they only just took the 1.38mm^2 package out of pre-production. I started a design last year of a tiny earring with ~102 addressable LEDs on it, a microphone, a bunch of supporting circuitry and this micro. https://i.ibb.co/JWh57LLw/IMG-20260408-183807502-HDR.jpg https://i.ibb.co/JWh57LLw/IMG-20260408-183807502-HDR.jpg Unfortunately by the time I was ready to order the boards I found the tiny package was unobtanium and had to resort to the second smallest package which isn't very small. Frustration! Not worth changing the design now...
- emctech 4mo agoAnd for people saying it is low on RAM and flash, you need to understand this is a low cost micro. You can also do a lot of work with a small amount of RAM by managing your memory manually. Through the use of C unions I have about 3kB worth of variables that get switched in and out depending on the mode we are in. I have enough space to record analog audio samples and perform a fourier transform over the samples and use the generated to data to drive algorithmically generated animations on the LED array.
- tauntz 4mo agoThese earrings look awesome btw!
- emctech 4mo agoThank you! I want to try and sell them but I just have a few bugs to squash and to finish off the mechanical design of the charging cradle.
- GordonS 4mo agoHave you blogged about the earrings perchance? They really do look great, and I'd love to see some details of your process.
- kridsdale1 4mo ago
- peteforde 4mo agoOne thing I find impressive is that this part has GPIOs equal to the total number of pins minus two. Economical is the word that comes to mind.
- watersb 4mo agoThis 32-bit microcontroller has 1 kB of RAM. The Apple Disk II Controller discussed yesterday used two 256-byte ROM chips and a shift register for dynamic memory. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723102 The linked article of the Disk II Controller has great detail about the state machine encoded in one of the ROMs, and walks through the bootstrap code stored in the other one. I haven't tried any microcontroller projects myself, but my first computer projects were on the small home micros of the early 1980s. I enjoy this kind of thinking.