UNIT Electronics' Cocket Nova Is a Breadboard-Friendly WCH CH552-Based Eight-Bit Dev Board

Mexican embedded electronics specialist UNIT Electronics has announced a low-cost development board, the Cocket Nova, built around the WCH Electronics CH552 microcontroller — a part that, unusually, makes use of Intel's classic 8051 architecture.

"The Cocket Nova CH552 is a development board that operates with the [WCH Electronics] CH552G microcontroller, easily fitting onto standard breadboards and programmed via USB Type-C," the company says of its creation. "The board includes an integrated Neopixel LED, reset and boot buttons, a power source selector, and two 1mm JST connectors that support QWIIC, STEMMA QT, and more protocols."

The gumstick-style breadboard, brought to our attention by CNX Software, ticks a lot of the usual boxes for a part of its type — but the WCH CH552 at its heart is an unusual beast, thanks to its architecture: Intel's 8051, first released in 1980 on the MCS-51 eight-bit microcontroller. While Intel may have long since abandoned the platform, it's still a usable architecture — particularly with a few modern tweaks, as found in the 24MHz core inside WCH's CH552.

Other features of the part include 1kB of external and 256 bytes of on-die RAM, 16kB of code flash, and 128 bytes of data flash, along with a USB interface for data and programming. UNIT's board brings out 17 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins including two eight-bit pulse-width modulation (PWM) outputs, four eight-bit analog inputs, six capacitive touch channels supporting up to 15 buttons in total, two UART, one SPI, and a software-based I2C bus.

More information on the board is available on UNIT's GitHub repository, where schematics and firmware are made available under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3; the company is selling the boards on Tindie at $6 each.