Bouffalo Lab Category - Page 3 of 3 - CNX Software

December 10, 2020December 10, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

RISC-V hardware & software ecosystem highlights in 2020

The RISC-V Summit 2020 is currently taking place virtually, and RISC-V International, a non-profit corporation aiming to drive the adoption and implementation of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), took the occasion to remind us of the growth of the ISA both in terms of commercial adaption, education, and other projects. Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, detailed the growth in memberships: This year, our technical community has grown 66 percent to more than 2,300 individuals in our more than 50 technical and special interest groups. We’re seeing increased market momentum of RISC-V cores, SoCs, developer boards, software and tools across computing from embedded to enterprise … We’re proud of our growing global membership, which has more than doubled in the last year to 1,000 total members, including 222 organizations.” RISC-V also launched the RISC-V Exchange now listing over 124 RISC-V cores, SoCs, and developer boards, as well as 129 […]

October 28, 2020October 29, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 33 Comments

The quest for a blob-free WiFi & Bluetooth stack for BL602 WiSoC

I thought I was done writing about Bouffalo Lab BL602 WiFI & Bluetooth RISC-V SoC for a while after first covering the chip itself, and then an inexpensive BL602 development board this weekend. But the BL602 SDK has shown up in various Github repositories, including Bouffalo Lab’s own bl_iot_sdk repository, and as more people are looking into it, there’s now an effort to develop a fully open-source blob-free WiFi & Bluetooth stack for BL602, and other Bouffalo Lab WiFi and/or Bluetooth wireless chips. Last day we communicate with Bouffalolab, finally they release the SDK of BL602 (RV32 chip of wifi+bt), all code is open, except libblecontroller.a, libatcmd.a, libbl602_wifi.a (while they have all symbol inside)https://t.co/giHsQ4ezXxwe have a fork too https://t.co/FiaAIxLBc8 — Sipeed (@SipeedIO) October 27, 2020 First, Sipeed says the code is mostly open-source except for three libraries: ibblecontroller.a, libatcmd.a, libbl602_wifi.a, all of which are un-obfuscated, and easy to disassemble. Then […]

October 25, 2020August 5, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

BL602 IoT SDK and $5 DT-BL10 WiFi & BLE RISC-V development board

Yesterday, we wrote about Bouffalo BL602 32-bit RISC-V WiFI and Bluetooth LE wireless SoC that should eventually compete with ESP8266 in terms of price but with more features, higher performance. and more resources like memory and storage. At the time, I noted I could not find any tools for the processor, but I was informed a BL602 SDK (Doiting_BL) and documentation had already been released on Github. The basic readme and a user manual are already available in English, but the main documentation is still in Chinese with various examples to configure GPIO, YART, WiFi, and Bluetooth. You’ll find the documentation in Github, as I could not find a website yet:

git clone https://github.com/SmartArduino/Doiting_BL

1	git clone https://github.com/SmartArduino/Doiting_BL

Go to Doiting_BL/docs/html folder and then open index.html in your browser to access the documentation. The SDK works both in Windows and Linux and relies on either Eclipse & OpenOCD or Freedom Studio & OpenOCD. A graphical software […]

October 24, 2020October 28, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi & Bluetooth 5.0 LE SoC will sell at ESP8266 price point

Hisilicon Hi3861 may be the first RISC-V WIFI SoC we’ve reported on, but due to political uncertainties and security concerns, supplies may not be available outside of China. So alternatives are welcomed, and Nanjing-based Bouffalo Lab (not a typo, 博流智能科技 in Chinese) has recently introduced BL602 and BL604 32-bit RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth LE SoC for low-power IoT applications that are supposed to compete against ESP8266 in terms of price but with higher performance and additional features. The BL602 will also be integrated into an upcoming Sipeed Longan-series board, and potentially a new IoT board from Pine64. BL602 / BL604 key features & specifications: MCU subsystem – 32-bit RISC-V CPU with FPU with dynamic frequency from 1MHz to 192MHz, L1 cache Memory – 276KB SRAM on-chip Storage 128KB ROM, 1Kb eFuse, and optional Embedded Flash on-chip XIP QSPI flash support Wireless Wi-Fi 4 – 802.11 b/g/n @ 2.4 GHz Bluetooth […]