Stefan Wagner
The CH55x is a low-cost, 8-bit enhanced E8051 core microcontroller compatible with the MCS51 instruction set. 79% of its instructions are single-byte single-cycle instructions, and the average instruction speed is 8 - 15 times faster than that of the standard MCS51. The special xRAM supports direct memory access (DMA), data fast copy command, and double DPTR pointers. The CH55x has a built-in USB 2.0 controller and USB transceiver, it supports USB-Host mode (CH554 only) and USB-Device mode, USB Type-C master-slave detection, full-speed (12Mbps) and low-speed (1.5Mbps) traffic, data packets of up to 64 bytes, and DMA. It has a factory built-in bootloader so firmware can be uploaded directly via USB without the need for an additional programming device.
I would really like one of these low cost USB chips to be loaded with Forth, and USB->serial functionality.
So you have a device which by default is a cheap usb->serial adaptor, but you can drop into Forth, and program it to do really simple things from the terminal, or just use the forth as a command interpreter for I/O control, or just use the forth to save serial macros.