A new evaluation board from Olimex puts WCH's CH32V006 RISC-V microcontroller within reach of anyone experimenting with open-source embedded software. The WCH-CH32V006EVT is built around the CH32V006K8U6 and is already documented as an upstream Zephyr target under the board name ch32v006evt, with on-chip support covering GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, DMA, PWM, watchdog, SysTick, clock control, EXTI, AFIO, SRAM, and flash. That matters because Zephyr's WCH support has been landing steadily, and the current stable release, Zephyr 4.4 from April 2026, makes the toolchain a practical option for these low-cost parts rather than a work in progress.
The part itself is a meaningful step up from the widely used 10-cent CH32V003. The CH32V006K8U6 pairs a QingKe V2C core running the RV32EmC instruction set at up to 48MHz with 62KB of CodeFlash and 8KB of SRAM, plus 256 bytes each of non-volatile system configuration and user memory. Peripherals include two USARTs, I2C, SPI, a 12-bit ADC sampling at up to 3Msps across eight external inputs, an OPA/PGA/CMP analog block with optional gain stages, 8-channel touchkey sensing, a 7-channel DMA controller, and up to 31 GPIOs. Timer resources run from a 16-bit advanced-control timer with complementary PWM, dead-zone control, and emergency brake support down to general-purpose and streamlined timers, a 32-bit SysTick counter, an independent watchdog, and a window watchdog.
Clocking and power are flexible for such a small chip. There is a factory-trimmed 24MHz internal RC oscillator, a 128kHz low-speed RC oscillator, support for an external 3MHz to 25MHz crystal, and clock monitoring, all within a 2V to 5.5V operating range. The evaluation board exposes 2.5V, 3.3V, and 5V supply options and keeps things minimal otherwise: a power LED, a reset button, a USB port for power, and two user LEDs.
Beyond Zephyr, the CH32V006 is covered by several open-source development stacks. The community-driven ch32fun project provides a minimal GCC-based stack with headers, examples, and tooling that runs on Linux, Windows, and WSL across the broader CH32V and CH5xx families. WCH's official arduino_core_ch32 adds CH32V006 to the Arduino Board Manager, installable directly from the IDE. The ch32-hal project from the ch32-rs community brings an embedded Rust HAL covering the CH32V0 family, with Embassy async framework support and embedded-hal trait compatibility. PlatformIO users have a path through the community-maintained Community-PIO-CH32V platform, which integrates with VSCode and VSCodium on Linux, and a setup guide covering CH32V006 on Linux from early 2026 covers the udev rules and toolchain configuration needed to get the WCH-LinkE programmer working. The one catch across all of these routes is that the board carries no built-in debug hardware, so programming and debugging require an external programmer. Zephyr documents flashing through minichlink, OpenOCD, and wchisp, with debugging over OpenOCD or minichlink.
The CH32V006EVT measures about 42 x 40 mm (1.7 x 1.6 inches) and is listed by Olimex at $11 (€10).
