Can you tell that I am a bit behind with the Zephyr “Weekly” Updates?… I am trying to think what’s the best format going forward to make sure y’all don’t miss the important changes coming out of Zephyr’s firehose and its hundreds of pull requests merged every week… while not drowning under said firehose myself 🙂 In the meantime, I will try to keep sharing blog posts as regularly as possible!
This week, I want to highlight two new boards (and their underlying SoCs) for which support was added in Zephyr during the last weeks of 2024, and that I know a lot of people have been eagerly waiting for. Namely, Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and WCH CH32V003EVT, are now officially supported in Zephyr… Happy New Year!
Raspberry Pi Pico 2
This has been a long time in the making but the latest addition to the series of supported Raspberry Pi boards in Zephyr—after the RP2040, a.k.a Pico, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and Raspberry Pi 5—is the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and its RP2350 dual-core microcontroller.
Kudos to Andrew Featherstone for driving this effort and to everyone else who helped get this merged upstream through testing, reviews, etc.
WCH CH32V003EVT
RISC-V has been a hot topic in the Zephyr community pretty much from day 1, and when the WCH CH32V003 micro-controller appeared a little over two years ago, it was only a matter of time before someone would try to get Zephyr running on it 🙂
In case you’re not familiar, the CH32V003 is a RISC-V micro-controller that runs at up to 48 MHz, has 2 KB of SRAM and 16 KB of flash storage. So… pretty small, eh? What’s small, too, is its price: it sells for under $0.10!
As of last month, initial support for CH32V003 is now available, alongside the reference dev board, the CH32V003EVT. There is obviously not a lot that one can fit in just 2KB of RAM, but all basic peripherals are supported (clock, GPIO, PWM, UART, etc.), and more WCH pull requests are already lined up.
There are dozens of other boards being added to Zephyr every month, but I thought that these two were particularly noteworthy, and I am really looking forward to seeing what people will start running on them now that they support Zephyr!
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Catch up on all previous issues of the Zephyr Weekly Update: