RISC-V & related romps in microcontrollers
I am convinced that modern embedded framework development is less about engineering and more about surviving a sequence of silently laid traps. I spent this past weekend trying to bring up code in src/radio on the new M5Stack Tab5—featuring the dual-architecture marriage of an ESP32-P4 and an ESP32-C6 Wi-Fi co-processor. What should have been a […]
This is an article I’m updating as I experience this device. June 17. First update. June 18, Hello World added. I was lucky enough to score one of the first Espressif S31-Korvo development boards. The board itself is a bit nifty as far as SBCs go, but let’s be honest, this is a development vehicle […]
I’ve come to accept that I’m an old-school vi user. With about forty years of muscle memory behind that sentence, I’ll say that I’m an effective vi user, but in today’s world of C++ overrides, sentence-long symbols, and huge lists of available methods, I _have_ felt the occasional pang of jealosy and tried to move […]
GPIO/tabI’ve seen variations of these products from China for months, but finally saw an offer I could only reluctantly refuse. Amazon had the AIPI-Lite AI Robot for about $17USD. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQNNVV36). A battery adds another $10. (“Battery not included”. Grrr.) That’s within range for my toy budget, so I was determined to take it apart. I […]
Quick Take / TL;DR (Grumpy Edition) “Somebody at Garmin decided to call this an eTrex again. I’m not sure whether to laugh, cry, or throw one of my 120 GPSes at the wall.” Screen & Battery: 3.0″ touchscreen, finally legible? Maybe, if the sun cooperates. 130h battery claimed — realistic only if it’s tucked in […]
I just finished watching Fast and Small C++ on YouTube. The title was a tad misleading for my taste, as it was a case study on a few cases instead of a guide on creating the same, but here we are. The speaker delivers a (very) few examples but does a case study on three […]
I was recently reading https://wp.josh.com/2020/01/22/wtf-sonoson-the-evil-companies-do-and-good-people-coming-together-to-stand-up-to-them/ where the author expressed an unpopular opinion on what was then the early problem of hardware becoming unusable when the companies lost interest. This is a bit off-brand for my posts here, but by definition, it’s my stage, and I’ll write what I want. (I’ll…
One of the nifty things about common open source software is that lots of people write down answers to their own problems. (Like I’m doing now.) The problem is that commands change, software gets moved between packages, etc. and it’s realy hard to figure out what actually applies to anything. PHP seems particularly problem to […]
This blog has always leaned heavily into RISC-V, but this year has been a bit of a low in RISC-V for me. That’s probably worth an article of its own, but since I was just asked what I’ve been using lately, I have to admit my time has been spent on a family that’s not […]
Beagle-V welcomes you to 2012. I wanted to like the new Beagle-V. It was the developer edition of Beagle-V (that was canceled) that was my introduction to “big” RV64G systems and I loved working on that board. It was canceled abruptly during development and Beagle wandered around in the weeds for a few years, but […]
Many of us have been pretty disappointed in the long lead time it takes to get chips from specification into production. For RISC-V devotees, this was brought into clearest focus this year where November of 2021 brought us ratified specification for Vector Computing 1.0, in particular, but we’ve mostly developed via emulated cores in software […]
The much anticipated products from Sipeed, The M1S Dock and M0 Sense are now being delivered to customers. Mine arrived in the U.S on December 20, to my surprise as the tracking number never fired on USPS Informed Delivery and Fedex did not announce the delivery. These were purchased boards and are not prerelease. M1S […]
Issues with USB-C powered development boards Below – Hall of Shame: Allwinner Nezha Bouffalo Labs BL706 AVB WCH CH32V307 EVT The symptom: dead boards More than once in my development time, I’ve been an early receiver of a development board that powers via USB-C. Invariably, the board is so new that there is no documentation […]
Though it was just announced last week, people are talking about Bouffalo Labs’ BL808 like it’s a Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) system. (This is the chip used in Pine64’s SBC called Ox64.) I just don’t see that happening. The opcodes for 32 and 64-bit encodings of RISC-V are quite similar, which is why so much […]
I don’t have enough LilyGO products in my lab; I should probably have more. They seem to make clever products aimed at the developer/hobbyist market (that’s me!) but it seems that they get undercut by features on on one product, then are months late to market on the next, It seems they manage to remain […]
History The Kendryte K210 seems to have been one of the early success stories for RISC-V, if not in mainstream computing, certainly in maker mindshare. The 64-bit device had two cores, enough support peripherals to be useful for your robotics project, enough AI to recognize faces or do image detection and following for your self-driving […]
In a recent blog post, Espressif announced the ESP32-C2. The Twitter thread from John Lee revealed an interesting twist; more on that in a moment. ESP32-C2 is a WiFi4 + BLE5.0 device with a single RISC-V core and 272MB of memory. It uses the familiar Espressif tools like ESP-IDF and frameworks such as ESP-Jumpstart and […]
About this article: This preliminary attack on Buttons on BL60x with Nuttx can be thought of as an article that’s part of Lup’s Book on BL606 generally and his notes on Nuttx on BL60x specifically. As I was the one that made this experiment, I documented it for the rest of you. As a spoiler, […]
The Bouffalo BL602 family of parts is a very popular low-end RISC-V part. It has WiFi, Bluetooth, and a handful of GPIO parts with 1928K of RAM and 128K of ROMso it’s able to hold. The 192Mhz part with 276K of RAM and 128K of RAM is low cost (<$2 in bulk) making it popular […]
Because of the difficulty downloading disk images from geographic distance or sites that may not translate well, this is a collection of important boot images for members of the D1 RISC-V processor. We have collected images and information from Fedora RISC-V Project and Debian RISC-V project as well as some information by Sunxi. The information […]