Wong's Cafe

Takeaway: don’t ever buy or use their stuff again.

welp, who knows this cute little RISC-V board can be such a pain in the ass? I didn’t but anyways here’s how I tried to set up the arduino-cli with it.

Pre-requisites

Grab any VM that has a linux kernel, as I’m writing this I’m using debian.

Need a VM for this because the software requires a proprietary and custom openOCD, and doesn’t even follow UNIX FHS standards.

Install arduino-cli

Set up cores

Following the official docs,

init the conf arduino-cli config init
start a new sketch just to test: arduino-cli sketch new wch32
update the index of cores: arduino-cli core update-index

Add the 3rd party core

open up config at ~/.arduino15/arduino-cli.yaml, add the link here:

board_manager:
  additional_urls:
    - https://github.com/openwch/board_manager_files/raw/main/package_ch32v_index.json

It’s also possible to version lock this by downloading this index locally and use it instead. The repo hasn’t been updated for one year now, I don’t suppose anything would change. ^[1]

run the arduino-cli core update-index again, then search with: arduino-cli core search wch.

WCH:ch32v should appear and use arduino-cli core install wch:ch32v

note the lower case here

Then it will install an extremely ancient version of gcc :) and compiling should work at this stage.

Deps

Now it should say missing some library file. Of course, since it’s a proprietary custom build of openocd and they can’t even bother statically link their stuff :)

basically copy their pre-built libraries to /usr/lib (which doesn’t follow FHS of course) (which will break your other applications using these libraries, and a update will break them all) by executing their shell script: ^[2]

cd ~/.arduino15/packages/WCH/tools/beforeinstall/1.0.0
./start.sh

go back and it should work now, yay!

cd -

arduino-cli compile -u

… except not, because upload will fail with an obscure reason:

Sketch uses 4956 bytes (7%) of program storage space. Maximum is 63488 bytes.
Global variables use 524 bytes (2%) of dynamic memory, leaving 19956 bytes for local variables. Maximum is 20480 bytes.
Open On-Chip Debugger 0.11.0+dev-02415-gfad123a16-dirty (2023-10-11-14:01)
Licensed under GNU GPL v2
For bug reports, read
	http://openocd.org/doc/doxygen/bugs.html
Info : only one transport option; autoselect 'sdi'
Warn : Transport "sdi" was already selected
Ready for Remote Connections
Error: open failed

I tried to edit the udev permission, but nothing succeeded. I’m not sure if it’s a VM problem or not.

At this point I’ve completely gave up, I genuinely can’t believe how they managed to deliver such a terrible experience with pre-existing toolchains, and their github issue page is now filled with unfortunate MacOS users who can’t even make libusb work.

Failed attempt at Setting up Arduino WCH support in VM

Pre-requisites

Set up cores

Add the 3rd party core

Compilation

Deps