Heroic Efforts Give Smallest ARM MCU a Breakout, Open Debugger

In today's episode of Diminutive Device Technology Overview, [Sprite_TM] is at it again - this time conquering the HC32L110. A few weeks ago, we have highlighted the small ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller, which is outstanding because of its exceptionally small size. We also pointed out a few hurdles, among them - hard-to-approach SDK and documentation, and difficulties making and assembling a PCB for such a small BGA. Today, we witness how [Sprite_TM] bulldozed through all of these hurdles for all of us, and added a few pictures to our collective "outrageous soldering" galleries while at it.

First, he figured out an example layout for this MCU that's achievable for us even on a cheapest 2-layer board from JLCPCB, keeping distances within the generic tolerance standards by snubbing out a few pins. As a result, we only lose access to four GPIOs - those will have to be kept as inputs, so that nothing burns out. However, that's the kind of tradeoff we are okay making if it helps us keep our PCB small and lightweight for projects where these factors matter. After receiving the resulting board, he also recorded a short tutorial on soldering such packages at home with a mere hot air gun and a few bare necessities like flux and tweezers - embedded below.

It doesn't end there, however, as he decided to work around the GPIO fanout limitation in a non-intended way. Evidently, [Sprite_TM] decided to have some fun, taking a piece of regular 0.1″ spacing protoboard and deadbugging the chip with magnet wire, much to our amusement. The resulting contraption, pictured above, worked - and this is ever something you'd like to be able to achieve yourself in times of dire need, whether you make something work or simply to be entertained by making use of a cursed mounting technique, there's an one-hour-long livestream recording of how this magnet wire contraption came to be. And, of course, that wasn't the last thing to be shared.

As a finishing touch, he has published bindings and wrappers for Huada SDK so that the chip is usable with GCC, GDB and OpenOCD. He also added datasheets to the same repository - auto-translated but quite readable. All-GPIOs-involved blinkie GIF of a magnet-wire-bound chip triumphantly concludes the write-up.

An addition to [Sprite_TM]'s toolkit is an addition to everyone's toolkit - the techniques, the insights, and the are all here for us to learn from. If you ever doubted your ability to work with small packages in general or this MCU specifically, now you have a whole lot more material to draw upon!

Wondering what kind of miniature device you might want to make? We hackers have mostly been having fun so far, building things like the USB-cable-hidden RubberDucky or a miniature PDP11, but there must be applications in, say, the wearable or medical fields where such a small MCU would prove itself to be a hacker's friend. Maybe you want to build an LED engagement ring with some Cortex-M0+ smarts? In fact, this microcontroller is small enough that it wouldn't be hard to hide inside your PCB itself.

#arm #howto #parts #armcortexm0 #armm0 #bga #chiponboard #chipscalepackage #cortexm0 #hc32l110 #huada #newpartday #sprite_tm #wcsp #wlcsp

New Part Day: Smallest ARM MCU Uproots Competition, Needs Research

We've been contacted by [Cedric], telling us about the smallest MCU he's ever seen - Huada HC32L110. For those of us into miniature products, this Cortex-M0+ package packs a punch (PDF datasheet), with low-power, high capabilities and rich peripherals packed into an 1.6mm x 1.4mm piece of solderable silicon.

This is matchstick head scale computing, with way more power than we previously could access at such a scale, waiting to be wrangled. Compared to an ATTiny20 also available in WLCSP package, this is a notable increase in specs, with a way more powerful CPU, 16 times as much RAM and 8-16 times the flash! Not to mention that it's $1 a piece in QTY1, which is about what an ATTiny20 goes for. Being a 0.35mm pitch 16-pin BGA, your typical board house might not be quite happy with you, but once you get a board fabbed and delivered from a fab worth their salt, a bit of stenciling and reflow will get you to a devboard in no time.

Drawbacks? No English datasheet or Arduino port, and the 67-page PDF we found doesn't have some things like register mappings. LILYGO promised that they will start selling the devboards soon, but we're sure it wouldn't be hard for us to develop our own. From there, we'd hope for an ESP8266-like effect - missing information pieced together, translated and made accessible, bit by bit.

When it comes to soldering such small packages, we highly recommend reflow. However, if you decide to go the magnet wire route, we wouldn't dare object - just make sure to send us pictures. After all, seems like miniature microcontrollers like ATTiny20 are attractive enough of a proposition that people will pick the craziest route possible just to play with one. They say, the madness of the brave is the wisdom of life.

We thank [Cedric] for sharing this with us!

#arm #microcontrollers #parts #armcortexm0 #armm0 #attiny20 #bga #chiponboard #chipscalepackage #cortexm0 #hc32l110 #huada #newpartday #wlcsp

New Part Day: The RISC-V Lichee-RV Module And Dock

Sipeed have been busy leveraging developments in the RISC-V arena, with an interesting, low-cost module they call the Lichee RV. It is based around the Aliwinner D1 SoC (which contains a Pingtou Xuantie C906 for those following Chinese RISC-V processor development) with support for an optional NAND filesystem. This little board uses a pair of edge connectors, similar to the Raspberry Pi CM3 form factor, except it's based around a pair M.2 connectors instead. The module has USB-C, an SPI LCD interface, as well as a TF card socket on-board, with the remaining interfaces provided on the big edge connector.

The minimalist Allwinner D1-based Lichee RV

So that brings us onto the next Sipeed board, the Lichee RV Dock which is a tiny development board for the module. This breaks out the HDMI, adds USB, a WiFi/Bluetooth module, audio driver, microphone array interface and even a 40-way GPIO connector. Everything you need to build your own embedded cloud-connected device.

Early adopters beware, though, Linux support is still in the early stages of development, apparently with Debian currently the most usable. We've not tested one ourselves yet, but it does look like quite useful for those projects with a small budget and not requiring the power-hungry multi-core performance of a Raspberry Pi or equivalents.

We've seen the Sipeed MAix M1 AI Module hosted on a Pi Hat a couple of years ago, as well as a NES emulator running on the Sipeed K210. The future for RISC-V is looking pretty good if you ask us!

Thanks [Maarten] for the tip!

#hackadaycolumns #newpartday #riscv #sipeed

New Part Day: Raspberry Pi HAT for IEEE1588 Precision Time Protocol

The new Real-Time HAT by InnoRoute adds IEEE1588 PTP support in hardware to a Raspberry Pi 4 nestled beneath. Based around a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA and a handful of gigabit Ethernet PHY devices, the HAT acts as network-passthrough, adding accurate time-stamps to egress (outgoing) packets and stripping time-stamps from the ingress (incoming) side.

This hardware time-stamping involves re-writing Ethernet packets on-the-fly using specialised network hardware which the Raspberry Pi does not have. Yes, there are software-only 1588 stacks, but they can only get down to 10s of microsecond resolutions, unlike a hardware approach which can get down to 10s of nanoseconds.

1588 is used heavily for applications such as telecoms infrastructure, factory equipment control and anything requiring synchronisation of data-consuming or data-producing devices. CERN makes very heavy use of 1588 for its enormous arrays of sensors and control equipment, for all the LHC experiments. This is the WhiteRabbit System, presumably named after the time-obsessed white rabbit of Alice In Wonderland fame. So, if you have a large installation and a need for precisely controlling when stuff happens across it, this may be just the thing you're looking for.

IEEE1588 PTP Synchronisation

The PTP client and master device ping a few messages back and forth between themselves, with the network time-stamper recording the precise moment a packet crosses the interface. These time-stamps are recorded with the local clock. This is important. From these measurements, the time-of-flight of the packet and offset of the local clock from the remote clock may be calculated and corrected for. In this way each client node (the hat) in the network will have the same idea of current time, and hence all network packets flowing through the whole network can be synchronised.

The beauty of the system is that the network switches, wiring and all that common infrastructure don't need to speak 1588 nor have any other special features, they just need to pass along the packets, ideally with a consistent delay.

The Real-Time HAT configures its FPGA via SPI, straight from Raspberry Pi OS, with multiple applications possible, just by a change on the command line. It is possible to upload custom bitstreams, allowing the HAT to be used as a general purpose FPGA dev board should you wish to do so. It even stacks with the official PoE HAT, which makes it even more useful for hanging sensors on the end of a single wire.

Of course, if your needs are somewhat simpler and smaller in scale than a Swiss city, you could just hack a GPS clock source into a Raspberry Pi with a little soldering and call it a day.

#fpga #networkhacks #raspberrypi #ieee1588 #newpartday #ptp #raspberrypihat #xilinx