World’s Smallest Arm Microcontroller: HC32L110 – Showcase & Programming Guide

The HC32L110B6 microcontroller from HDSC is an absolutely tiny Arm M0+ powered microcontroller. It is housed on a simple development board, the LilyGo T-HC32 that comes in at an affordable price of around £7. It features user input in the form of two buttons, a reset button and a user button but does lack some expansion options in terms of GPIO. It also features an RGB LED. The board comes in at 30 x 22mm.

The HC32L110B6 chip features an Arm Cortex M0+ processor core running at up to 32MHz. It has 32KB of onboard flash memory and 4KB of RAM. There is a 12-bit ADC capable of sampling at an impressive 1MSPS. There are 8 useable ADDC channels. In terms of peripheral interfaces, there are two UARTs (including LPUART), one SPI and I2C controllers. Programming can be done in the Keil MDK development environment, details can be found in the link below.

You can purchase the LilyGo T-HC32 at the following links:
And the HC32 chip is available here:

Toolchain setup instructions and datasheets are available here:

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:17 PCBWay
02:02 Pricing
02:45 Dimensions
03:05 HC32L110 Specs
04:50 Dev board specs
05:20 Toolchain Setup
09:34 Thoughts and Conclusions

Take a look at some RP2040 boards covered here:

-- Equipment we use regularly --
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All videos and tutorials on this channel and mentioned websites are for educational purposes only.

[LearnEmbeddedSystems]

Correction!! At 0:40 I said we were looking at the HC32L110B8 chip, in fact we are looking at the B6 variant!

[tookitogo]

How big is the ARM SoC inside the Apple Lightning to HDMI adapter? For those who don’t know: Lightning isn’t fast enough for uncompressed HDMI, so instead the iPhone or iPad uses its built in h264 encoder to compress the outgoing video, which is sent over Lightning to the SoC in the adapter, which actually runs a tiny stripped-down version of the iOS kernel. The SoC then decodes the h264 stream and outputs it to HDMI.

Anyhow, IIRC from teardowns that is a tiny chip, too.

[TuttleScott]

when I first saw the dev board I was looking at the voltage reg thinking it sure doesnt have a lot of ports :P

[luluthecat]

Please more videos on this chip! This is the only vid i could find about this chip and im interested

[tookitogo]

I know it’s petty, but it’s like nails on a chalkboard hearing Keil pronounced like “keel”. It’s actually pronounced like “Kyle”.

(Keil was a German company before Arm acquired them, and in German, “ei” is pronounced like “eye”.)

[LegalizeAdulthood]

I like that you bring together all the missing bits in your video for developing with these boards!

[RonLaws]

the ADC and the I2C bus makes me think probably useful for sensors with some basic logic either as triggers (relay control via gpio) or data logging/transmission via a supplementary wireless module, you could no doubt connect a tiny OLED display to it, or a more traditional character LCD

[Cptnbond]

Not much use for us hobbyists - where BGA is just troublesome, and the IC physical size is not such a concern, but look at STM32G031F8P6, which is far more useable. I have a prototype board in the D1 mini form factor in the works with this chip. This board can be programmed with STM32CubeIDE. Cheers.

[Crackedce]

i2c to spi bridge would be a useful application. looking at solutions for this in the current design i am working on at work.

[connormccarter]

I think battery powered HID would benefit from this chip. I think it would be interesting to set up some looping code and measure the power usage over say an hour to see what this chip would be like in portable devices.... Thanks for the video!

[SianaGearz]

Bloody dust particle of a micro!

At least it has an internal oscillator so i wager a guess, a usable application circuit is nearly zero size. Don't have anything in mind though. It has no wireless connectivity, it has no USB, and other things i can think of can do with an easier to handle package.

[roysigurdkarlsbakk]

Looks nice for doing very small embedded things, but it'd be fine to have a portable development environment, like vscode/platformio or even the arduino IDE. Do you know if the software you linked to above is available for linux/mac? All I could see there, was windows things.

[triularity]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same controller die used in some SD cards, just placed in its own chip package.

[wouladjecabrelwen]

thank you. I will be always sitting in the first row.

[Tristoo]

these people have serious problems with naming their products

[CarlJdP]

I've always wondered about multi chip interleaved ADC sampling e.g. to use as front end for a basic scope for debugging, experimentation or just an educational exercise. Provided I can get the interleaved timings right, 4 of these could equate to a theoretical 12bit 4M samples/s ADC, and/or make it reconfigurable to 4ch x 12bit @1MS, or 8ch @ .5MS logic analyzer 🤔.

Oscilloscopes are just to damn expensive for me - I dont need absolute time and/or voltage measurement accuracy, just relative measurements. E.g. if for a change in x, how does that affect y & z.

Disclaimer: Just a self thought hobbiest here

[PeetHobby]

I used the NXP LPC1102, is tiny bit bigger but is more than a decade old.

[aryeguetta]

Can't download the legacy compiler from that link you provided. Looks like I was not able to download. you mentioned that we need legacy compiler 5.06 - I can NOT download it.

[g.a]

hi, thank you for your very interesting video, I have installed the evaluation version of keil uVision5 with the compiler version 5 it is possible to compile the illustrated project.
Greetings

[platin]

Is there a way to one time compile and flash the code on this one so it can be soldered to a board say as a led controller etc.
Basically wondering is there a pogo pin board which can be used for programming the flash.