I bought handful of CH32V003 boards to play around with running this project off of. My development setup is currently using an Espressif ESP8266, and I was leaning towards the CH552 until I discovered the CH32 line. The latter is very cheap, RISC-V, and has an officially supported Arduino build environment.
What these boards don’t have is a bootloader. I assumed because the 552 shipped with a bootloader that the 003s would have one as well. Whoops. Short of ordering the appropriate WCH WLink E programmer, there is one potential solution. Charles Lohr did the tough footwork of putting together a build chain for the CH32003 (https://github.com/cnlohr/ch32v003fun) and in that, there’s a firmware option built on an Arduino Uno that might be enough to load a bootloader. I guess we’ll find out.ย
One of the things that I wanted to do on the display, was draw a little Jolly Wrencher. I’m planning on taking this Supercon ’24, and it’s a nice callout as I can draw to the display. So I’ve been experimenting with drawing Jolly Wrenchers
These were made using the excellent bitmap editor from emutyworks. It takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it it’s quite nice.
I think I’ve settled on a design, but I’m not sure about the wrench lengths. I need to check how much space I actually have to populate.