This week at my desk, we played around with this CH552-based QT Py board before the chip shortage. Now parts are plentiful, so we made some prototypes and are trying out the CH55xduino (github.com/DeqingSun/ch55xduino) board support package. and, it works!
There's a few things to watch for given it has C but not C++ support. However, for about '40 cents' per chip, you get a 8051 with native USB that can do CDC/HID, has 4x 8-bit ADCs, hardware serial, I2C, SPI and doesn't need a crystal or a lot of passives.
Obviously there's down sides to such a minimal 8-bit microcontroller chip, but we think it could be super fun for some very basic USB projects!
We'll show off a couple quick demos we threw together. We think of it as a native-usb-ATtiny85-alike, a nice update to our old Trinket '85s.
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