EEVblog #1140 - 3 CENT Micro LED Blinky with ICE!

Getting the 3 cent Padauk microcontroller to blink a LED.
Or at least the in-circuit emulator blinking a LED with C.

UPDATE: LCSC have just said that they will offer a free programming service for a limited time to anyone. Just email them when you place your order.

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[bigclivedotcom]

Those chips are total candy. I've never felt so excited about a microcontroller since the PICs and their development system and programmers first became affordable to minions like us. (PIC16C54 and EPROM development version era) It would be great if they had a flash (Or EPROM?) variant in the family and the programming algorithm got added to the TL866 style universal programmers. The English manual for the chips is very good, with a very readable guide to the assembly code instructions. As you were looking through the data I particularly liked the reference to the ready-baked 1Hz interrupt on a 32.768 kHz crystal.

[EEVblog]

UPDATE: LCSC have just said that they will offer the free programming service for a limited time to anyone. Just email them when you place your order.

[TheHuesSciTech]

6:22 Say what you will, but the start-up time of that IDE is exactly what the start-up time of an IDE should be on a 2018 computer.

[littleal]

You've possibly found out what the unmarked 8 pin micro controller is that Big Clive always seems to come across. Something like this must be in literally millions (maybe billions) of Chinese made items, which would explain the low price. Maybe yourself and Big Clive could team up with the 'electronupdate' guy who likes decapping IC's?

[therealjammit]

Who is going to be the first person to program it as a 555 replacement?

[michaelnorman]

You’re like a boy in a candy store; so very fun to share your excitement.

[trwappers]

I once bought ~2300 AtTiny2313 and programmed them myself. Had a little robot + script that did most of the "work". you needed to drop a stack of them in a cardboard "feeder", it would align, program and "test" them (mostly if they booted at all). Finished in ~90h, only 2 of which required actual human attention if you don't count refilling the stack and giving it a light tap on a semi-regular basis.

[MoraFermi]

This is exactly where Moore's law still is valid. A speck of smart silicon dust that we can sprinkle over almost anything at almost zero price.

[flomojou]

Not sure if you missed it, but on the lcsc site there is a link to the manual/data sheet for each micro, which includes description of the instruction set, registers, etc. It's in Chinese and due to its size you can't just go to Google Translate and select the file, however you can import it into Google Docs which has a translate option under to the Tools menu. You can then download it (From the File menu) using quite a few different formats including PDF, docx, etc. The translation isn't bad at all and is very usable, not sure if this is how they generate the English versions of their other tools since it seems pretty similar.

[wangyeeee]

13:48 actually the manual explains that you do not need 9v power as the ice is powered directly by usb. The 9v input is only used if there is something power hungry plugined to the ice.

[HenryLoenwind]

These are one step in the evolution of electronics toward being software-defined. Gone are the times when you had to fiddle with caps, resistors, etc. when you wanted to have something like a "reset" button you have to press for 3 seconds. How you can just add a 3-cent micro and code that condition. Want a flashing LED? Add another one for that. Want your monitor to fail after 2 years but you cannot get those "bad" caps tuned perfectly? ...

[hrnekbezucha]

More than the chip I'm impressed with the IDE. 3mb download and does everything it should with nice help. Bugfixes and better translation and it would really be awesome

[UpLateGeek]

My parents went to see Coldplay, and they were given these light-up wrist band with LEDs and a radio receiver inside, which were remote controlled to flash in different patterns based on the music. This is the sort of throw-away application that a super-cheap micro would be useful for. Something simple, maybe one-time use, that you might need in huge quantities.

Actually, the Coldplay thing is a great idea. Say you wanted it to only switch on the radio receiver during the actual concert, then afterwards it switches to autonomous mode, controlled by the micro. Not having to run a radio receiver would probably use less power, so it'd last longer, and it could have user-replaceable batteries so it's not useless after it runs flat. The micro could be programmed to switch to the autonomous mode if it doesn't hear a signal from the receiver after a short time.

[UpcycleElectronics]

Up/Down buttons with PWM and passive filter as a replacement for a potentiometer.

PID controller

Simple single push button interface to differentiate single press/double press/hold with separate output functions.

[LucasHartmann]

Instruction set: PMS150C datasheet, pages 50-61. Summary on 62.

[dinkc]

This is really great, I'd love to see you do more projects with these little micro's :) The fact that they wrote the development software nice and compact with all of that code-help is just downright respectable. I'm impressed!

[JerryWalker]

Incredible, I remember when I started with microcontrollers you had to get special (expensive) windowed devices and each build run cycle required erasing the devices in a UV eraser and reprogramming them so I tended to write much larger blocks before testing whereas today it is easier to almost write line by line and test each small block as you go. The first ICE I purchased made life so much easier as I could develop in 'real time' but it cost £68, 000.00 and you needed a separate (£2800.00) module for each device that you wanted to use so you had to be really serious about product development before starting. It is good that today the same can be had for just a few $'s.

[spudhead]

We have all the programming procedures in the data sheet. So we should be able to rig up an ICP header on your boards. It might be a viable option for lowish runs.

[WILFRED]

The reason you can't find the explanation of why runs at 2Mhz is because it's clock is "1/2n" but you are missing "n" at 15:19.

[thecakeredux]

I'm not gonna lie, the IDE's functionality looks pretty decent for my standards. China you scary.

Also I kind of chuckled over "Somebody bought 10.000 of these", because at first I was really impressed, then I realized that's 300$.