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  • Could you put a few thousand of these on a PCB and have a super duper tiny compute cluster?
    by LoganDark
  • It's a bit low on RAM, otherwise it's similar to a game boy advance. Maybe after the GBA, GBA SP, and GBA micro, it's time for a GBA.. nano?
    by ant6n
  • A silly question (from a non-HW guy). Why are digital bathroom scales so coarse? Some have a weight resolution of +/- 500 grams. Would a better microcontroller make a weight faster or more presise? I guess this TI micro controller is overkill for a bathroom scale.
    by arnejenssen
  • This 32-bit microcontroller has 1 kB of RAM.

    The Apple Disk II Controller discussed yesterday used two 256-byte ROM chips and a shift register for dynamic memory.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723102

    The linked article of the Disk II Controller has great detail about the state machine encoded in one of the ROMs, and walks through the bootstrap code stored in the other one.

    I haven't tried any microcontroller projects myself, but my first computer projects were on the small home micros of the early 1980s. I enjoy this kind of thinking.

    by watersb
  • One thing I find impressive is that this part has GPIOs equal to the total number of pins minus two. Economical is the word that comes to mind.
    by peteforde
  • It seems awesome, but I'm having a problem with figuring out how can a "normal" person use it. How would YOU use it, reader of this comment?
    by self_awareness
  • At $0.20 in 1k quantities, this is TI's answer to the CH32V003, Puya PY32, and the STM32C0 series. It's great to see tier-1 silicon vendors participating in the race to the bottom for jellybean microcontrollers.

    The 1KB of SRAM is admittedly very tight (even WCH's 10-cent RISC-V parts usually give you 2KB), so you are strictly in bare-metal, carefully-managing-your-stack territory.

    by anonli
  • This line of micros has been out for almost 2 years now but they only just took the 1.38mm^2 package out of pre-production. I started a design last year of a tiny earring with ~102 addressable LEDs on it, a microphone, a bunch of supporting circuitry and this micro. https://i.ibb.co/JWh57LLw/IMG-20260408-183807502-HDR.jpg Unfortunately by the time I was ready to order the boards I found the tiny package was unobtanium and had to resort to the second smallest package which isn't very small. Frustration!

    Not worth changing the design now...

    by emctech

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