WEACT CH32V203C8T6 up and running on Arduino w/ WCH Board Manager + Question

[rka]

Happy Thursday All!

Since I dipped my toe into the CH32Vxxx wonderland I've progressed a good bit and wanted to ask a couple questions to the more knowledgeable folks here to keep from getting bogged down.

I've progressed through the CH32V003/MounRiver Systems phase and when I discovered the WCH board manager for Arduino, I decided to see if that was clearer to me as a tool.  I was able to program the EVT board to flash a LED which showed me that I'd accomplished *something*.

Just for laughs, I tried programming the WEACT CH32V203C8T6 and after a little head scratching, I was able to flash it's LED too. 

Since I was on a roll, I decided I'd try to make my i2c 1602 LCD work with it and began figuring out how to use the LiquidCrystal_LCD libraries work.  I naively believed that the WCH board manager had taken such things into consideration when the created their tool, but it was immediately clear that the only LiquidCrystal_i2c library there was the Arduino native one which is focused on the ATMEGA it says.

I rolled up my sleeves and went to the Git instance for the WCH board manager and found some spurious i2c entries, but it looks like a work in progress.

Does anyone know of libraries that are suited for the CH32V203 et.al. controllers out there under another heading?  Using my pointy little head, I tried various searches but couldn't find anything that even was close.  One fell using a different LCD display but that's about it.

I'd appreciate any pointers or creative suggestions.  My reasoning is that surely there is some person or group that would have solved this problem since the RISC-V family of devices seems to have made headway.

By the way, Free "Pro tip" - I found that I needed to unlock the read/write function in the WEACT board using MounRiver 'config' function before I could do anything with it, on either MounRiver or Arduino.  That would at least get you to flash a LED

rka