$2 Dev Board - What's The Catch? W806 Microcontroller Review

this board is the hlk w806 development board which features the winner micro w806 microcontroller this board is readily available for around two dollars on sites such as AliExpress which is super cheap coming in at about half the price of the Raspberry Pi Pico so what is the catch well stay tuned to find out because there is a fairly big one welcome to a learning embedded systems microcontroller review We aim to keep you informed of the latest microcontrollers for you to use in your projects so make sure you are subscribed if you want to stay up to date as previously mentioned this board is available from AliExpress from a variety of different sellers or at least different listings many of these listings actually contain stm32 in the title which is quite misleading and I think this is a little trick to try and increase their SEO or something along those lines the chip on this board is not an STM chip you can get the development board option or the w806 chip on its own and the prices of the development board fluctuate quite a bit um every now and then but mine came in at one pound 59 which is just a hair over two dollars you can quite often find coupons on this site and which work might cover shipping for example in terms of shipping these are pretty much all shipped from China and so for me it took about a month or so for mine to arrive to the UK once it did arrive the board came in an anti-static bag with no extras not that I would expect any at this price point but just note that you will need your own header pins in terms of Dimensions it measures in at 65 by 26 millimeters which is roughly the same size as a Raspberry Pi zero okay so let's get into the features of this board starting with the winner micro w806 chip winner micro is an IC manufacturer based in Beijing and this is a 32-bit chip which is actually itself based on the e804 chip from t-heads schwantiantai I know I pronounced that completely wrong so if someone could please correct me in the comments that would be great um t-head is a semiconductor subsidiary of Alibaba and they make a lot of risk-5 based cores and processes but this one here isn't risk 5 based instead it is based on the sea Sky instruction set architecture this is a single chord processor which runs up to 240 megahertz it has one megabyte of onboard flash 288 kilobytes of RAM and in terms of interfaces there are six uart channels one I squared C interface one I squared s interface as well as a single SPI interface there are five pwm interfaces as well as four ADC Channels with a Max sampling rate of one kilohertz in total there are 44 gpio pins this chip also features an sdio host interface supporting sdio 2.0 SDHC and MMC 4.2 as well as device support up to speeds of 200 megabits per second sdio is an abbreviation of secure digital input output which is used to access things like SD cards and the like there is also an LCD controller on board which can control up to a 4 by 32 segment display as well as the ability to use 15 touch sensors there are a host of security features that win a micro tout such as Hardware encryption modules firmware encryption and other features that make this board a quote iot microcontroller but this is a bit strange because there is no sort of Wireless connectivity on this module however the w601 chip from my uh from winner micro does feature Wi-Fi connectivity so that might be an interesting chip to look at in the future in terms of the remaining features of the board we don't really have much else we have a ch340 chip to enable USB programming and also debugging through the micro USB connector a micro USB connector is expected at this price we have two buttons a boot Button which selects the boot mode and a reset button there are also three blue LEDs on board this board is single-sided so that's everything to cover on this board in terms of a pin outs I couldn't find an official diagram but there is a large table in the datasheet which covers which GPO pin is capable of which functions we have a single 3.3 volt output pin as well as two ground pins the 5 volt USB power from the USB is not broken out although the rest of the gpio that is on the the w806 chip is broken out to all these pins which are actually not quite nicely labeled for two dollars we can't complain too much so far but this is where the catch starts to begin there is a sort of SDK for the w806 chip however it isn't really complete it is a bit of a faster setup and there is no real documentation available for this however it is possible to set up the tool chain and I will show you how to do that now in my experience it is significantly easier to set this up on a Linux machine so I'm going to use a dual booted Ubuntu instance I'm going to use this SDK by i o setting on GitHub I'll leave a link down in the description if you want to have a poke around and their instructions are quite clear firstly we need to download a zipped file of the tool chain from T head which is an interesting experience as you need to create a user account then navigate to the download page whilst the the website is all in Chinese and for some reason my Google translate plugin wasn't helping me out very much once you have the tool chain we can unzip it and then move these unzipped files to a some to a more sensible folder than the downloads folder then we need to make this file uh this tool chain read only using the CH own command and all these commands are written out in the GitHub readme then we clone the GitHub repository that we're following the tutorial on and that is the SDK I put this folder in my home directory in a folder called projects enter that folder and then we can run the make menu config command you will need to have the build Essentials and the n-curses library installed I'll put all this on our website as a sort of written tutorial or list of notes because it might be a bit easier to follow like that and I will link that down in the description once this make Command has completed we can now see a setup menu we need to use the tab and enter keys to navigate around this menu we need to find tool chain configuration and then we need to set the tool chain path to where we left the tool chain in my case I put that in opt tool chains and then see sky and the rest of the folder name we can then save and exit this menu then we can run the mate command and hopefully everything should build successfully if it does build successfully we can now plug in the board over USB and see what Porter is connected to in my case that was TTY USB 0 but so you can find out what port it is connected to in your case by running dmesg and then the bitwise or operator with grep then TTY USB star I say the bitwise or operator because that's what it is in C um I think that it's called the pipe operator in Linux basically it runs the First Command dmsg and then the grep TTY on the output of the First Command and this should filter out your output just to show the USB ports that are connected you can see here that our board is connected to TTY USB 0. we need to go back into the config menu by running the make menuconfig Command again and then we're going to gout download configuration and set the USB port name into the download Port we can then save and exit the configuration menu with this completed we can then download the demo program to the board by running make flash command this should begin the download process and wait at serial sync at this stage you just hit reset on the board and the download should complete if the serial connection can't connect you might get a 225 error in this case make sure that your user account is added to the dial out group I actually fixed this by editing some udev rules to allow any user to write to the TTY USB ports again I'll put this Solution on our website should you need it and that should be the program now downloaded to the board and in this case the LEDs are blinking or sort of pulsing if you will to write your own program to the board you need to navigate to the app folder within the SDK we downloaded and then we can edit or rewrite the files in there such as the main.c file in the SRC directory as you may have picked up on the documentation on this board and chip is somewhat thin and what is there is in Chinese which means we are relying on some dodgy Google translations now there is nothing inherently wrong with this but it just goes to show that this chip was never really designed to be exported and used outside of the Chinese market and this in turn means that there is relatively small user base of this chip and hence there isn't much community support for the w806 I will upload some of the Google translated files that I have created onto our website if you want to take a look so would I recommend this board probably not I don't think that it is worth the hassle to set up the tool chain work your way through poorly translated documentation and end up with a mostly working but not quite development environment if you are looking for a cheap microcontroller board then you can't beat the Raspberry Pi Pico the SDK for the Pico is extensive and there is some fantastic documentation and Community Support out there it is around twice the price but this is still a very affordable board you could also look at some of the stm32 boards that are known as a blue pill for example that have a large user base so plenty of support is out there for those boards as well which might be something to look into so that is everything I have for today I hope that you enjoyed the video if you have then please leave us a like and consider subscribing leave any questions and comments you have down below thank you very much for watching and as always have a nice day

Channel: Learn Embedded Systems

Views: 78,919

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Id: ehy5F7rlO7c

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022