Giveaway Week 2024 – RT-Thread Vision board with Renesas RA8D1 Arm Cortex-M85 MCU

It’s already Friday, and the fifty prize of CNX Software’s Giveaway Week 2024 will be the RT-Thread Vision board equipped with a Renesas RA8D1 Arm Cortex-M85 microcontroller, a camera, an optional LCD display, and a 40-pin GPIO header.

The board is used as an evaluation platform for the Renesas RA8D1 MCU and RT-Thread real-time operating system. As its name implies, it’s mainly designed for computer vision applications leveraging the Helium MVE (M-Profile Vector Extension) for digital signal processing (DSP) and machine learning (ML) applications.

I haven’t reviewed it myself and instead, received two samples from RT-Thread who sent them to me by mistake, so I’ll give them away here and on the Thai website. But it was reviewed by Supachai who tested the RT-Thread Vision board with OpenMV and ran a few benchmarks last June. The Helium MVE did not seem to be utilized in OpenMV at that time (June 2024) since the performance was inferior to another STM32H743 Cortex-M7 board. But maybe it has been implemented since then.

The prize for this giveaway includes the RT-Thread Vision board with a camera (no LCD), a USB-A to USB-C cable, and a plastic case.

To enter the draw simply leave a comment with your country and whatever else you’d like to say (no links in the body of the comment). If the country is missing, I’ll consider the entry void. Other rules are as follows:

• Only one entry per contest. I will filter out entries with the same IP and/or email address.
• Contests are open for 48 hours starting at 10 a.m. (Bangkok time) every day.
• Comments will be closed after 48 hours. If comments are open, the contest is still going on.
• Winners will be selected with random.org and announced in the comments section of each giveaway.
• It’s a global contest, so anybody can enter, except people residing in Thailand who can instead enter the contest on CNX Software Thailand with much better odds.
• I’ll contact the winner by email and expect an answer within 24 hours, or I’ll pick another winner. Note that I may not be able to contact people who log in with Facebook, Twitter, or Google, so it’s better to use an email address to enter the draw.
• Shipping
  • $14 for registered airmail small packet or ePacket for overseas shipping payable via PayPal within 48 hours once the contest (for a given product) is complete. If PayPal is not an option in your country, we can try to find another payment solution.
  • All prizes will be shipped at the same time once we get all the winners, so around November 14.
• I’ll make sure we have 7 different winners, so if you have already won a device during this giveaway week, I’ll draw another person.

Good luck to everyone! The RT-Thread Vision board can be purchased on AliExpress for $29.70 with a camera or $41.64 with a camera an an LCD.

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