If you are fans of searching for cheap electronic components on eBay, you will have noticed the appearance in recent months of some new models of Arduino clones, identified as CH340G. These boards are much cheaper than other Arduino models. In this post, we are going to talk about these new cheap Arduinos thanks to the CH340G chip.
What is the CH340G chip?
The CH340G is a new USB / TTL converter, which replaces the ATMEGA16U2 and the FT232RL. By all accounts, it must be much cheaper (I estimate between 2-3€) because the appearance of these models has drastically lowered the prices of clone Arduino boards.
Of course, the rest of the specifications and characteristics remain exactly the same. These new clone boards are not only compatible but are, for all practical purposes, identical to the “original” Arduinos.
Remember that Arduino is an Open Source project, so these generic boards are perfectly legal. What would be illegal is to identify them with the original logo, or not to indicate in the advertisement that it is a clone board.
This small revolution has made what we discussed some time ago in the post What is Arduino? Which model to buy? sufficiently outdated to need an update.
Currently, the price of the Arduino Uno R3 Atmega 328P has dropped to €2.80. The Arduino Mega R3 2560 drops to €7.5. For its part, the Arduino Nano v3.0 Atmega 328P 5V 16Mhz sells for the irresistible amount of (hold your drool) €1.95.
Needless to say, at this price, my favorite board has stopped being the Arduino Mini Pro 2 (€1.70), to make way for the Arduino Nano v3.0 as the favorite workhorse board, given the convenience of having an integrated mini USB port, and not needing an external programmer (as the Arduino Mini Pro v2 does).
How to recognize a board with CH340G?
Recognizing a board with a CH340G model is really simple. You can quickly check by looking at the chip, as shown in the following image.
If you don’t have the board physically because you haven’t bought it yet, it is normal for the advertisement to indicate if it has a CH340G chip. On the other hand, if you are going to buy an Arduino and it is very cheap, similar to the prices I have indicated, it most likely has a CH340G chip.
Be careful, some manufacturers will take advantage to sell these new boards at the old price. Although it’s not a scam, because these boards are fully functional, you will be losing a few euros unnecessarily.
Getting our Arduino CH340G board to work
As we have mentioned, these boards work the same as any Arduino, so all functions, tutorials, and programs for Arduino will work without any problem. The only thing necessary is to install the CH340G driver so that the computer recognizes Arduino as a USB device.
The drivers for the different operating systems are available on this page CH340G Drivers, or directly in the following links for Windows CH340G Driver Windows Xp, 7, and 8, and for Linux CH340G Driver Linux.
We simply download and run it, and we can now use Arduino completely normally, programming it with the Arduino IDE, and of course with serial port communication.
