USB-to-Everything Chip!
As soon as I saw this product listing, I had to immediately go look up more information about this chip. This CH347 Development Board has, as the name suggests, the CH347 chip as well as a USB-C interface and a DIP switch. The features blew me away when I first read them: USB to UART, I2C, SPI, JTAG or just GPIO! We’ve all got drawers full of USB to serial UART boards for programming Arduinos and other devices that use serial, but this chip takes things a step further and adds a bunch of other serial protocols. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of USB chips!
It brings to mind the venerable Bus Pirate, an amazing board by Dangerous Prototypes which allows you to connect to just about any serial protocol out there, as well as a host of other features. While this chip has some of those same features, the interface is quite different. This chip is still so new that it has barely started appearing in Western markets yet, so this is your chance to be ahead of the curve! That of course also means there is very little software yet available for interfacing with this chip.
The company that makes the CH347, called WCH, does have some documentation on their website, but it hasn’t yet been translated into English. There is a datasheet download for those who can read Mandarin, but I suspect most of the experimentation will be looking at the demonstration code provided here. The chip can run in a few different modes, including HID (Human Interface Device) meaning it can act like a keyboard or mouse and send data that way. It also supports CDC which allows it to send data in a variety of ways, including appearing as a COM port. The demonstration code is very Windows-centric, but once the protocol is figured out, I suspect it won’t be long at all until we see software for this chip on all platforms. Once that happens, expect to see this chip all over the place!