00:00Midnight, alright, Arduino people, if you're on a budget and you still want to build something
00:04genuinely cool, this one's for you. I went through the listings so you don't have to,
00:09and these 5 are the best MCU chips under $10 right now. A couple of them are almost absurdly cheap,
00:16and yeah, one of them costs less than a soda. 013, first up, the CH32V003 in the 8-pin SOP
00:24package. $2.49, and you get it in packs of 10, which is perfect because you'll fry one eventually.
00:31This is a RISC-V chip from WCH running at 16 MHz with built-in one-wire debug,
00:37and it sips power like a houseplant. For little jobs reading a sensor, firing a relay,
00:42making a tiny status light, you do not need a $40 board. If you want one thing from this list,
00:48start here. 036, same chip, more legs. This is the CH32V003A4M6 in the 16-pin package,
00:58260. Identical silicon inside, but now you've got more GPIO, which means more sensors, more LEDs,
01:06more of everything without adding a second microcontroller. I've watched people buy the
01:108-pin version, run out of pins in a weekend, and order this one immediately after. Skip that step.
01:18Tiny difference in price, way more breathing room. 0.59, now the boring but essential one,
01:24this is a WCH Link e-programmer, and it's $0.42. I'm not exaggerating. If you want to program those
01:32CH32 chips, you need a programmer, and the official ones cost more than the chips themselves.
01:38This board handles single-wire debug and plugs straight into the WCH toolchain, plug it in,
01:43flash it, move on. If you're ordering the CH32s above, grab one of these too.
01:50Cheapest tool in my drawer and I use it constantly.
01:531.21, and here's where things get fun if you want wireless but still want to stay under $10,
01:59the ESP32C3 Super Mini. 536 gets you Wi-Fi and Bluetooth only on a board that fits in your pong.
02:06Home. It's an RISC-V chip, fully programmable from the Arduino IDE once you install the ESP32 board
02:12package. I use these for home automation nodes, sensors that phone home, anything that needs to
02:18push data to a server. Only real caveat, the ratings of 4.7, and most of that grumbling is
02:25about documentation, not the hardware. 1.44, finally, the one you already know,
02:30the 8 Mega 328p. 397, and the listing gives you both the DIP28 through-hole version and the SMD
02:38option. This is the classic Arduino brain, the same chip from the original Uno, with 32 kilobytes of
02:44flash, 2 kilobytes of RAM, and a 20MHz ceiling. Get the DIP version if you want to socket it into
02:51a
02:51breadboard or swap it out the day you let the magic smoke out. It's not exciting. It's just bulletproof,
02:58and every tutorial on the internet already knows it. 206, all links are in the description,
03:04and prices on these move fast, so check them before you order. If something here saved you a
03:10few bucks, hit like, and subscribe, I'll keep hunting down the good stuff.
