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December 30, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

Sipeed Lichee RV RISC-V module gets $5+ carrier board with HDMI and USB ports, optional WiFi

Sipeed introduced the Lichee RV Allwinner D1 Linux RISC-V board going for just $17 with 512MB RAM last month. While with a USB-C port it could be used as a standalone part, its dual M.2 connector makes it more like a module and we noted a tiny carrier board was in the works at the time. The baseboard is now available and known as the Lichee RV Dock adding HDMI and USB ports, as well as a 40-pin GPIO header for just $5, or $8 if you’d like to get Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity through a Realtek RTL8723DS module. Sipeed Lichee RV Dock specifications: Supported system-on-module (SoM) – Lichee RV module with Allwinner D1 RISC-V processor @ 1 GHz, 512MB DDR3, MicroSD card slot, and USB Type-C OTG port Storage – Optional SPI flash Display interfaces HDMI port up to 4Kp30 Optional RGB interface for up to 720p30 […]

November 24, 2021November 26, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 22 Comments

Sipeed LicheeRV – A $16.90 Allwinner D1 Linux RISC-V board

Finally! There’s now a much more affordable Allwinner D1 RISC-V Linux board thanks to Sipeed LicheeRV Nezha CM SBC sold for $16.90 and up on Aliexpress, that’s much cheaper than the $100 asked for Nezha SBC, although still not incredibly cheap as we’ll see from the specifications below. Sipeed LicheeRV is actually both a board and a system-on-on-module with an edge connector, and is equipped with 512MB DDR3, a USB-C OTG port, a MicroSD card socket, and an SPI display interface. The dual M.2 edge connector can be plugged into a carrier board, and they will be a “86 Box” (86x86mm) for HMI display that can be used for home automation. Sipeed Lichee RV specifications: SoC – Allwinner D1 single-core XuanTie C906 64-bit RISC-V processor @ 1.0 GHz with HiFi4 DSP, G2D 2D graphics accelerators Memory – 512MB DDR3 memory @ 792 MHz Storage – MicroSD card slot Video – […]

August 18, 2021February 27, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

$18 Tang Nano 4K FPGA board comes with HDMI output, optional camera

Sipeed’s Tang Nano 4K FPGA board is an upgrade to the company’s Tang Nano FPGA board with a more powerful GOWIN GW1NSR-LV4C FPGA with 4608 LUT (instead of 1152) and a Cortex-M3 microcontroller embedded into the chip. Like the previous board, the new Tang Nano 4K features a USB-C port for power and downloading the bitstream, but replace the RGB LCD interface with an HDMI port, and adds support for an optional OV2640 camera. Tang Nano 4K board specifications: FPGA – GOWIN GW1NSR-LV4C aka GW1NSR-4C (See PDF datasheet for details) with 4608 logical units (LUTs) 3456 registers 16 multiplier parameters 180Kbit block SRAM, 64Mbit PSRAM 2x PLL Up to 44x user I/O Arm Cortex-M3 hard processor Storage – 32 Mbit NOR flash Video Output – HDMI port Camera I/F – DVP camera connector for OV2640 camera sensor up to 1600 x 1200 (UXGA) resolution USB – USB Type-C port for […]

July 14, 2021July 14, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

MAIX-II A AI camera board combines Allwinner R329 smart audio processor with USB-C camera

Earlier this year, we wrote about Sipeed MAIX-II Dock AIoT vision devkit with an Allwinner V831 camera processor with a small 200 MOPS NPU, an Omnivision SP2305 2MP camera sensor, and a 1.3-inch display. But for some reason, which could be supply issues, Sipeed has designed a much different variant called MAIX-II A with a board based on Allwinner R329 smart audio processor, a 720p30 USB camera module, and a 1.5-inch display. MAIX-II A board specifications: Main M.2 module – Maix-II A module with Allwinner R329 dual-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.5 GHz, 256MB DDR3 on-chip, a dual-core HIFI4 DSP @ 400 MHz, and Arm China AIPU AI accelerator for up to 256 MOPS, plus Wi-Fi & BLE and a footprint for an SPI Flash. Storage – MicroSD card socket Display – 1.5-inch LCD display with 240×240 resolution Audio – Dual microphones, 3W speakers Camera – 720p USB-C camera module based […]

April 29, 2021April 29, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Allwinner V831 NPU (Neural Processor Unit) reverse-engineered

When Sipeed introduced MAIX-II Dock AIoT vision development kit, they asked help from the community to help reverse-engineer Allwinner V831‘s NPU in order to make an open-source AI toolchain based on NCNN. Sipeed already had decoded the NPU registers, and Jasbir offered help for the next step and received a free sample board to try it out. Good progress has been made and it’s now possible to detect objects like a boat using cifar10 object recognition sample. Allwinner V831’s NPU is based on a customized implementation of NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) open-source architecture, something that Allwinner (through Sipeed) asked us to remove from the initial announcement, and after reverse-engineering work, Jasbir determined the following key finding: The NPU clock defaults to 400 MHz, but can be set between 100 and 1200 MHz NPU is implemented with nv_small configuration (NV Small Model), and relies on shared system memory for all […]

January 6, 2021January 20, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments

Sipeed MAIX-II Dock is an Allwinner V831 powered AIoT vision devkit

Sipeed introduced MAIX development boards powered by Kendryte K210 dual-core RISCV processor with AI accelerators in 2018, and we tested the Maixduino and Grove AI HAT based on the solution using Arduino and Micropython the following year. It works fine for audio and video project requiring AI acceleration at low power, but performance (resolution/fps) is limited. So if you’d like a bit more oomph for your audio & vision AI projects, as well as proper Linux support, Sipeed has just launched MAIX-II Dock powered by Allwinner V831 Cortex-A7 AI camera SoC clocked at up to 800-1000 MHz and 64MB on-chip DDR2 RAM, as well as a Full HD camera and a small display.MAIX-II Dock specifications: MAIX-II core module SoC – Allwinner V831 single-core Cortex-A7 processor clocked at 800-1000 MHz with 0.2TOPS AI accelerator, H.264/H.265/JPEG video encoder up to 1080p30 System Memory – 64MB DDR2 in package (SiP) Storage – Optional […]

November 9, 2020May 3, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments

XuanTie C906 based Allwinner RISC-V processor to power $12+ Linux SBC’s

Alibaba unveiled Xuantie-910 RISC-V core (aka XT910) in 2019 for powerful SoC with up to 16 cores, but an update in 2020 revealed the company planned to have a complete RISC-V core family for a wide range of application from low-power microcontrollers to server SoCs. At the time, I just assumed the company planned to keep their cores to themselves, but time proved me wrong as T-Head, the Alibaba subsidiary in charge of developing RISC-V cores, started to cooperate with Allwinner to develop open-source processors, which should lead to low-cost Linux capable RISC-V SBC very soon according to a tweet from Sipeed. Good News: We get first chip which based on XuanTie C906 (RV64GCV), it have abundant interface (HDMI/RGB/DVP/MIPI/GMAC/…), and will be able to run Debian system.Last and most important, the basic dev board price is start at 12.5$ (1% of HiFive Unleashed)。 pic.twitter.com/EJbXTJ5eMb — Sipeed (@SipeedIO) November 6, 2020 […]

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 […]