It’s good to see that slowly things come back to normal!
Open fest 2021 will be provided in normal face to face format in the open space – the King Boris garden – “Maimunarnika” where up to 1200 people can be hosted.
As always the participation is free of charge.
There will be the traditional soldering party with the help of the Open Fest 2021 volunteers from the Technical University club of Robotics.
Olimex is donating 50 pcs of our new Musical badge kits, which contain only PTH components and are very easy to solder even for beginners:
Musical badge is board with two sensor buttons which start and stop music play when touched.
The Open Fest dates are during our Summer Break so we are not be physically present there but will watch online the event.
Donald Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming” is still a popular monograph which covers many types of programming algorithms and their analysis.
Although the first publishing was back in 1968, the book has been updated many times and is still a good source for learning algorithms.
Inside the book Knuth uses a hypothetical computer named MIX for writing all of his algorithms. The MIX computer has 9 registers and about 70 machine instructions.
Today in our Project section we got a submission of a MIX computer implementation on iCE40HX8K-EVB by Michael Schroeder.
RK3328-SOM-EVB is evaluation board and reference design for RK3328-SOM:
Software support:
Android 10
Linux Kernel 4.4 is the official SDK of Rockchip. There is just basic mainline support with no drivers for USB3 although these SOCs are on the market for quite a lot of time.
These who follow our account in Twitter know our small teaser posted on March 1st.
It’s small base board for RP2040-PICO the $4 module with the Cortex-M0+ processor made by Raspberry Pi foundation.
We were ready with the prototype for a long time but the RP2040-PICO modules were tricky to source 🙂
Raspberry Pi suffer from the same problems the semiconductor industry have now – no enough components to organize production and the PICO modules are hard to obtain.
From the picture above you can see what our idea is:
Small board taking power from the USB on the right just below the RP2040-PICO module.
LiPo battery charged for handheld operation and power backup.
Reset button.
Micro SD card
Audio output
HDMI connector with DVI signals to connect to monitor
UEXT connector with UART, SPI, I2C, 3.3V and GND to attach different sensors
JST2.0 4 pin I2C + power supply connector
Debug connector for Serial adapter
The price of RP2040-PICO-PC including the original RP2040-PICO module from Raspberry Pi with soldered headers all in one ready to use computer will cost EUR 12.00
As RP2040-PICO modules now are not available in production quantities for purchase, we decided that until we wait we could make our own version of RP2040-PICO, which to be pin to pin drop in replacement.
Fortunately some RP2040 processors are available now, so we can make our own DIL40 board, this is how our RP2040-Py board was born:
It’s mechanically same as size, with connector signals like the original RP2040-PICO.
Functionally RP2040-Py is same as RP2040-PICO, but has some imoprovements:
RP2040 SOC
2MB of SPI Flash
USB micro connector on the right hand
Power supply DC-DC with 3.3V up to 2A (if the 5V source can provide)
Reset and Boot buttons
two 20 pin rows on the side with same signals making it drop pin to pin compatible.
uUEXT connector on bottom
As the board still had plenty of not used space we decided to add USB JTAG debugger, which will allow you to debug your RP2040 SOC with step by step execution, to watch variables and set breakpoints while you develop your code.
There will be three versions of the RP2040-Py:
Basic: same as RP2040-PICO but with higher current DCDC power supply (3.3V up to 2A output) additional UEXT connector and RESET button. The price of this module will be EUR 5.00
Basic+ same as Basic but with soldered headers and additional left hand side micro USB, which can be used to power the board while the left hand side micro USB can be used as USB device or USB host. The price of this module will be EUR 8.00
Debug: same as Basic+ but with populated JTAG parts, which allow real time programming and debugging. The price of this module will be EUR 19.00 The JTAG debugger is tested to work with OpenOCD/Eclipse/Visual Studio, ARM (Keil) IDE and IAR Systems EW.
Searching for more info about their new H313 SOC I found old news from August 2020, where Allwinner announce the development of AP SOC with RISC-V and praising Open Source Hardware and the open ISA of RISC-V.
They say in this announcement that they will have AP (application processor) SOC with RISC-V in 2021!
There is lot of development around RISC-V in the last years. Espressif have their ESP32-C3 which is with RISC-V SOC, but it can’t run Linux as has not enough memory and video. We still can’t see affordable silicon capable to run Linux.
There is announcement for BeagleBoneV but still not in production and at quite higher price compared to ARM boards on the market.
Allwinner is known to be able to design and produce low cost SOCs. Let’s hope the semiconductor crisis caused by Covid19 will not delay their plans.
So is the year 2021 when we will see $35 Linux running boards with RISC-V?
I’m crossing fingers!
As soon as we can get our hands to these SOC we will make OSHW OLinuXino with it!
OSHW design and affordable SOC will lead to affordable boards and boost of the software development of RISC-V too.
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