The breadboard microcontroller experimenter has a host of platforms to work with that can be had in the familiar DIP format. Old-school people can still find classic 8-bit platforms, the Ardunisti have their ATMegas, and PIC lovers have a pile of chips to choose from. But ARM experimenters? Out of luck, because as we have previously reported, popular past devices such as the LPC810 in a DIP8 package are now out of production.

News comes from China though of a tiny ARM Cortex M0 for pennies that may not be in a DIP8, but is in almost the next best thing. The Synwit SWM050 can be had in a TSOP8, which though it’s not quite as friendly as its larger SOIC8 cousin, is still easily solderable onto a DIP8 adaptor for breadboard use. Spec-wise it’s 5 V tolerant, has an 8 kB FLASH and 1 kB of RAM, 6 GPIOs, and can clock away at a not incosequential 36 MHz.

We have [Sjaak] to thank for the discovery of this device, and for doing a lot of work including getting some die shots taken to dig up and make sense of the Chinese documentation, and to provide some dev tools should anyone want to play with it.  There’s even a small breakout board for the experimenter unwilling to design their own.

Earlier this year we marked the passing of the DIP8 version of the LPC810 microcontroller, and for those mourning it we made an important point. It’s now normal to use one of the vast array of single board computers instead of a bare microcontroller, you might wish to ask yourself why you would do so.

Thanks [Ziew] for the tip.