The contest gave you the choice of a board or two chips (I chose the board). They had 300 boards and 200 chips to distribute. Proposals were due by April 7, 2022.
The company making the chip (and board) is "WCH", which is Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics Co., Ltd. WCH is short for "WinChipHead (WCH)". They are in Nanjing, China.
The ch32v307 is based on a 32 bit RISC-V core running at 144 Mhz.
On chip there is 64kb of sram and 256kb of flash.
There are 8 uarts, 10 timers, and a lot of IO.
Just for comparison, the ESP32-C3 has a 32 bit RISC-V running at 160 Mhz, 400kb of ram, a 4MB (megabyte) flash (spi), and Wifi (2.4 Ghz) and BLE 5. These sell for about $5 (including shipping) on AliExpress.
So, how can the ch32 stack up against the esp32? Well, the big thing is that it has 10 Mbit ethernet on the board I will receive (it is capable of gigabit, but the board only has a 10M Phy). It also has USB 2.0 full speed. It also has a lot of IO ports.
Frankly, the 400K of ram in the ESP32-C3 gets my attention and in itself would be enough to pull me to the esp32. If I really needed a lot of IO, the ch32 might win. And there is nothing like wired ethernet for many things I like to do.
It would be interesting to compare power consumption.
Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]