Bouffalo Lab Category - Page 2 of 3 - CNX Software

July 29, 2022August 4, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 29 Comments

Pinecil V2 soldering iron gets BL706 Bluetooth LE RISC-V MCU, USB PD EPR support

PINE64 is about to launch the second generation Pinecil RISC-V soldering iron with the Pinecil V2 featuring a new Bouffalo Lab BL706 RISC-V microcontroller with Bluetooth LE connectivity, optimizations for higher power levels, as well as tentative support for the new USB PD EPR standard (Extended Power Range) working at up to 28V. I don’t solder every day, but when I do, I use my Pinecil soldering iron, as it’s heating super fast and does the job, and in my case, works quite better than the TS100 soldering iron. So it should come as no surprise that the Pincel is the most popular consumer hardware from the PINE64 community (after SOPine modules), and the new Pinecil V2 is a welcome upgrading building on the same design but with Bluetooth LE connectivity and a lower tip resistance. Pinecil V2 preliminary specifications: MCU – Bouffalo Lab BL706 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller @ 144 […]

May 23, 2022May 23, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

CherryUSB – A lightweight USB device/host stack for embedded systems

CherryUSB USB stack for embedded systems

CherryUSB is a lightweight open-source USB device/host stack for embedded systems with one or more USB interfaces. The stack implements various class drivers such as CDC, HID, MSC, audio, video, and so on. It’s apparently part of Boufallo Lab SDK (e.g. for BL702 MCU), and has been ported and tested with WCH CH32V307 RISC-V MCU, STMicro STM32F4, and Nuvoton NUC442 Cortex-M4 microcontroller, as well as a two Arm Cortex-M3 microcontrollers I’ve never heard of: EastSoft ES32F3 and MindMotion MM32L3xx. CherryUSB device stack highlights: Support for USB2.0 full and high speed Endpoint irq callback USB classes support Composite Device Communication Device Class (CDC) Human Interface Device (HID) including “Custom HID” Mass Storage Class (MSC) USB VIDEO Class (UVC1.0,UVC1.5) USB AUDIO Class (UAC1.0, UAC2.0) Device Firmware Upgrade CLASS (DFU) MIDI CLASS (MIDI) Test and Measurement CLASS (TMC) Vendor class Remote NDIS (RNDIS) support Support WINUSB 1.0,WINUSB 2.0 with BOS (Binary Device Object […]

December 27, 2021August 7, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

$1.8 XT-ZB1 Zigbee & BLE devkit features BL702 RISC-V module

Bouffalo Labs BL702 is a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller with a 2.4 GHz radio for Zigbee 3.0 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE connectivity that we first found in the Sipeed RV-Debugger Plus UART & JTAG debug board that did not make use of the radio at all. But a BL702 development kit was brought to my attention, with the XT-ZB1 devkit equipped with a Zigbee & BLE module of the same name, and sold for just $1.80 per unit on Aliexpress. Shipping adds $4.63 where I live, but they also offer packs of 5 or 10 with the same shipping fee, meaning if you buy 10 the total cost should be around $22 including shipping, or around $2.2 per board. Alternatively, the module alone goes for $1. XT-ZB1 devkit specifications: XT-ZB1 wireless module with MCU – BL702C 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller @ 144 MHz with FPU, 132KB RAM, 192KB ROM, 1Kbit eFuse Storage […]

August 5, 2021September 26, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

BL-63B – A smaller BL602 IoT module that sells for $1.5

Bouffalo Labs BL602 is a low-cost, low-power RISC-V microcontroller that offers 2.4 GHz WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 LE connectivity for IoT projects for about the price of ESP8266. We first discovered it last year, together with a development board. Pine64 created its own PineCone board fitted with the $2 PineNut module, and some reverse-engineering work has started on BL602 SDK. But there’s now another smaller BL602 module with “Machine Intelligence” (that’s the company name) BL-63B that sells for $1.5 on Taobao in China, as well as on LCSC Electronics albeit you’d need to purchase 1000 pieces to get that price, and single-unit pricing is currently $2.5. BL-63B WiFI & BLE module specifications: SoC – Bouffalo Labs BL602 32-bit RISC-V processor @ up to 192 Mhz with 276KB RAM, 128KB ROM, 1Kbit eFuse, WiFi and BLE Storage – 2MB flash Wireless 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFI 4 1×1 SISO up to 65 Mbps […]

July 8, 2021October 8, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Reverse engineering the SDK for BL602 RISC-V WiFi & BLE microcontroller

Bouffalo Lab BL602, and its big brother BL604 with extra GPIOs, are RISC-V microcontrollers with WiFi and Bluetooth LE that offer an alternative to Espressif Systems ESP32 Xtensa based WiSoC, although Espressif has also designed its own RISC-V solution: ESP32-C3. Soon after the “announcement” in October 2020, we found out the SDK and a relatively cheap BL602 board, but the SDK has many closed-source binaries. Soon after Sipeed and Pine64 expressed their interest in developing an open-source toolchain and even an open-source WiFi (and BLE) stack. Time has passed and even got a Pinecone board in January, but did not do anything with it, especially seeing the status of the software. The same cannot be said for Lup Yuen Lee (aka MrTechBlog) who spent a lot of time doing interesting with Pine64 BL602 module and board including playing and thoroughly documenting his work with Tensorflow Lite, connecting the board to […]

June 21, 2021June 23, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

$3.5 RV-Debugger Plus UART & JTAG debug board comes with BL702 Zigbee & BLE RISC-V SoC

USB to UART debug boards are a necessity for anyone playing with single board computers, at least when using bleeding-edge bootloader or Linux kernel where the target board may not always boot, or when troubleshooting booting problems. Those are often based on FDTI or WCH chips, but Sipeed RV-Debugger Plus features Bouffalo Lab BL702 Zigbee & Bluetooth LE RISC-V SoC instead and offers both UART and JTAG interfaces. So let’s have a look at both the board and SoC. Sipeed RV-Debugger Plus USB to TLL debug boards are meant to be simple and that’s the case for Sipeed latest BL702 board as it comes with a 12-pin connector with Tx/Rx for UART, 8 signals for JTAG, plus 5V, 3.3V, and GND power signals. We can also see pads for Tx/Rx/CTS, a boot button, a crystal oscillator, and a USB-C port to connect to the host computer. What I don’t see […]

January 14, 2021January 14, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Pine64 mailbag – PinePhone postmarketOS Edition, PineCone BL602 board, and Pinecil soldering iron

Pine64 community was pretty busy last year with the launch of several products. Recently I’ve received a couple of packages with some of those products, namely PinePhone Community Edition: PostmarketOS, PineCone WiFi & BLE IoT board based on BL602 RISC-V SoC, and Pinecil soldering iron also based on a RISC-V chip for control, but this time GD32V generic-purpose MCU. I’ll most show what I have received without going into too many details, except for PinePhone which I have already set up and used for one hour or so. PineCone BL602 board I received PineCone at the end of last year in a separate envelope with the board only. There’s not much to it with the BL602 processor offering WiFI and Bluetooth, a USB-C port for programming and power, and a few I/Os. The board is interesting as it is the first RISC-V IoT board with wireless connectivity built into the […]

December 31, 2020March 19, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Year 2020 in review – Top ten posts and stats

It’s this time of the year when we look back at what happened, and what may be next. 2020 did not pan out as planned in more ways than one, but there were still some interesting developments. Based on 2019 announcements, 2020 was promising to be an exciting year for Amlogic and Rockchip with the expected launch of RK3588 and S908X high-end processors for 8K capable devices, but we’ll have to wait for 2021 for this to happen. Instead, the most interesting processor of the year from the Allwinner, Amlogic, and Rockchip offerings was probably Amlogic S905X4 processing adding AV1 hardware decoding. As pointed out in our “RISC-V 2020 highlights” post, it was a fairly eventful year for RISC-V architecture, although there’s still a long road ahead, especially for application processors. We had seen some general-purpose and Bluetooth RISC-V MCUs in 2019, but 2020 saw the launch of the first […]