$2 Dev Board - What’s The Catch? W806 Microcontroller Review

The HLK-W08 Microcontroller from WinnerMicro is a W806 based microcontroller board coming in at a seriously budget price of 2$. This is a fairly minimal board due to the low cost. The W803 chip is based on XuanTie’s E804 microcontroller and has 1MB of on-board flash storage and plenty of connectivity through SPI, I2C and UART. It is fairly a compact board which measures in at 65mm x 25mm, approximately the same size as the Raspberry Pi Zero. You can program this board by using a custom SDK and toolchain setup that we describe in this video. The WinnerMicro W806 chip powers this board. This is a 32-bit C-SKY single core processor which runs at 240MHz. It has 288KB of RAM. There is also 1MB of flash memory. In terms of interfaces this chip supports 1 SPI, 6 UART, 1 I2c and 1 I2S controllers. There are 4 analogue to digital converter channels. There is also some hardware encryption features aiming this to the “IoT“ markets. You can purchase the HLK-W08 at the following links: AliExpress (affiliate): https://s.