100ASK-V853-Pro - A feature-rich Allwinner V853 board designed for AI vision applications

The 100ASK-V853-Pro board is a development kit consisting of an Allwinner V853 system-on-module board (SoM) and a feature-rich carrier board with a large number of interfaces. Allwinner V853 supports up to 1TOPS of NPU computing power and is mainly for AI vision application development.

The core board contains a DDR and eMMC as well as a PMU chip (AXP2101) and is connected to the carrier board through a board-to-board connector. All the functional resources of the V853 are drawn out through the carrier board. The carrier board comes with 2-channels CSI camera interfaces as well as RGB and MIPI DSI display interfaces. Although 1 TOPS of AI computing power is not outstanding, the NPU can still be used to accelerate AI vision applications at the edge. The board also comes with four USB 2.0 ports (two Type-A, two Type-C), an 100Mbps Ethernet port, a 22-pin header for expansion, and five programmable user buttons.

100ASK-V853-Pro Specifications:

V853 Core Lite
- Soc – Allwinner V853 with a single Arm Cortex-A7 core, a Xuantie E907 RISC-V core, and a 1 TOPS NPU, an ISP image processor. and Allwinner’s Smart video engine capable of up to 5M @ 30fps H.265/H.264 encoding and 5M @ 25fps H.264 decoding.
- Memory – Optional 512MB, 1GB DDR3
- Storage – Optional 8GB, 32GB eMMC 5.1 flash module
- PMIC – AXP2101

Carrier board:
- Storage – MicroSD card slot
- Video Output
  - 1x RGB LCD interface for RGB Screen
  - 1x MIPI LCD interface for MIPI Screen
- Audio
  - 1x S/PDIF audio output
  - 2x Speaker header
- Camera I/F
  - 1x 2-lane MIPI interface for MIPI CSI
  - 1x 4-lane MIPI interface for MIPI CSI
- Networking
  - 1x 10/100M Ethernet RJ45 port
  - XR829 WiFi and Bluetooth module
- USB – 2x USB 2.0 Type-A ports, 1x USB 2.0 Type-C OTG ports
- Debugging – 1x USB Type-C port for serial console
- Expansion – 22-pin expansion header
- Misc – 8x buttons (Power, Reset, FEL, and 5 user buttons)
- Power Supply – DC Power Jack

Rich peripheral interfaces make this development board suitable for camera-related projects. Currently, the V853 SoC supports Allwinner’s official Tina Linux system, but the developer (GLGH_) of the Allwinner V851s/V851se board also ported Debian GNU/Linux to V853, providing another option besides Tina Linux. Support is available through the official forum (in Chinese), where we’ll also find a tutorial to get started with the 100ASK-V853-Pro development board, as well as instructions to use the RGB and MIPI displays.

This development board is not yet available outside of China, but should eventually sell on the DongshanPI Store on Aliexpress. At present, there are only 512MB DDR versions of SoMsold on Taobao for 99 RMB (about $14) with 8GB eMMC flash and 129 RMB (about $18) with 32GB eMMC flash. 449 RMB(About $65) will get you a complete kit with an Allwinner V853 core board (8GB) and the carrier board, while the 32GB kit costs 499 RMB (about $72).

Leo Zachary

Leo became a part-time writer for CNX Software in 2022 and works as a software engineer in an embedded software company in China. He’s been passionate about embedded development and the Internet of Things for many years, with extensive industry experience, and a new and unique vision!