WCH Expands Arduino IDE Support for the CH32 RISC-V-Based Microcontrollers
Windows, Linux, and macOS support for WCH's CH32 RISC-V microcontrollers available as an Arduino IDE package.
A recent X post by Patrick Yang, CTO of WCH (Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics), demonstrated a video showing off support for Linux and their CH32 Arduino Core. This announcement generated interest on social media because Arduino support for the CH32 has finally come. However, some CH32 chips already had Arduino IDE support for several months!
You might recognize the names WCH or CH32 from a couple of places. WCH manufactures the popular USB-to-serial chip ch340. Also, we recently wrote about a Teeny USB-C MIDI Synth and OLEDscope. Both of these projects used WCH's CH32V003. This 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller has gained notoriety because it only costs 10 cents!
Those projects rely on a command-line toolset to compile their code. Alternatively, WCH offers MounRiver Studio. This Eclipse-based IDE included compiler and programmer tools modified by WCH to support their microcontrollers. However, that IDE is only available for Windows and Linux. Also, users must download separate support packages for each chip or board.
WCH introduced Arduino IDE board support at the end of May 2023. This initial package provided the Arduino library core for two WCH evaluation boards. It included the modified versions of OpenOCD (OpenOCD_WCH) and xPack RISC-V Embedded GCC (risc-none-embed-gcc) used with MounRiver.
At first, arduino_core_ch32 only supported Windows, despite re-using the existing toolchain. When WCH released an Arduino IDE tutorial in October 2023, one YouTube commenter asked for Linux support. They did not have to wait long! About two months later, in late December 2023, WCH released version 1.0.4 of the Arduino IDE Support package. This newest version adds support for Linux and macOS. This version also includes updates that significantly increase the chips/development boards supported by the package.
https://github.com/openwch/board_manager_files/raw/main/package_ch32v_index.jsonYou can install CH32 support in the Arduino IDE for Windows, macOS, and Linux by adding their board URL to the board manager. For a list of supported boards or if you run into trouble with any of those platforms, check the arduino_core_ch32 GitHub repository. There are some notes for each operating system for known issues.