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Are there any good <$100 RISC-V dev boards out?
by sydthrowaway 5y ago
Are there any good <$100 RISC-V dev boards out?
- rwmj 5y agoGood & $100, no. The volumes being produced make that impossible right now. But there are cheaper boards around. A summary can be found in the RISC-V Foundation board giveaway (https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/05/03/the-risc-v-foundation-to-give-away-1000-risc-v-development-boards/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/05/03/the-risc-v-foundatio...), but there exist more than that. Unfortunately the one we were hoping would come out about now - the BeagleV - just got cancelled.
- nix23 5y agoIt would be really cool if the Raspberry Pi Foundation could jump in.
- rwmj 5y agoWhat could they do though? Raspberry Pi only exists because there are hundreds of millions of Arm CPUs being built for phones and tablets, and a tiny fraction of these end up in SBCs. The sheer volume means each chip can be had for a few dollars. There is no such ecosystem for RISC-V yet. The largest known order was AllWinner/T-Head (reportedly 5 million through TSMC).
- sydthrowaway 5y agoAh damn. Would you say synthesising a RISC-V CPU on a FPGA dev board would qualify as an alternative?
- rwmj 5y agoFPGA dev boards aren't that cheap, particularly one that can synthesize a 64 bit multi-core RISC-V CPU (in fact, there is one that can do it and it costs nearly $3000). The other problem with synthesized CPUs is that the clock speeds are very slow, unless you pay a great deal of money for the FPGA. They're a lot of fun though - I have PicoRV32 in a very low end Lattice FPGA which cost, like $30 I think? It can only run single C programs, not even an embedded kernel, but I love playing around with it.
- threshold 5y agoGet a large fabric Xilinx FPGA from ebay, reball it and make a simple PCB with Altium auto routing with JTAG, SPI flash, some memory. And find a license for Vivado.
- rjsw 5y agoYou may not need a new PCB, there are systems with a big FPGA [1] that could make a good host for a RISC-V design. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303446
- threshold 5y agoThat’s a Spartan 6 but you really want the larger fabric parts. If you go to Digikey they will quote starting at 20k, but on ebay a few hundred will do assuming you have a Vivado license capable of building a bitstream. It is possible to commandeer a board as in that post but often not worth the time vs just making your own. Rarely prototypes with only the power distribution and JTAG appear. Those are a bit easier. Like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/114784061306?hash=item1ab9a9c77a:g:OzYAAOSwMFFgiGm- https://www.ebay.com/itm/114784061306?hash=item1ab9a9c77a:g:...
- duskwuff 5y agoThat board looks like it might have been a prototype of a Fusion-io card. Compare: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SanDisk_Fusion_ioMemory_PX600-5200_PCI-E_SSD.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SanDisk_Fusion_ioMem... It's basically useless for SoC development, though, as there's no memory on board, no I/Os other than PCIe, and no practical way to add any.
- ncmncm 5y ago[Edit: Crowd Supply,$25... Oops!] Pine64 has very nice $4 boards, equivalent to typical ESP microcontrollers. While not up to Linux, they are wholly adequate for several totally usable embedded RTOSes.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y agoThere are actual RISC-V-based ESPs for the typical price of $3-4. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c3 https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c3
- ncmncm 5y agoIt has been my impression that ESP SOCs are really just hard-configured FPGAs. Is this correct? (There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that, except for possible clocking / reduced power state oddities as reported in the older ESP products. I would love to learn more details about that!)
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y agoNo, I specifically meant development boards, not chips. They are not much more than a chip, though (a simple antenna, 32-48 pins, a crystal oscillator, a couple of LEDs, and a couple of buttons). https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002783695684.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002783695684.html
- ncmncm 5y agoI misremembered both supplier AND price! It was Pine64, and only US$4. https://pine64.com/product/pinecone-bl602-evaluation-board/ https://pine64.com/product/pinecone-bl602-evaluation-board/ The Ali Express boards look equally intriguing. And the price is right!
- UncleOxidant 5y agoI'd go with the Pine64 board. I ordered some of these BL602 boards from aliexpress (not the ones above) a few months back and the documentation is abysmal and they seem to require a windows application to program them.