The Cheapest RISC-V 64 Computer (by Now)

D1s supports a wide variety of peripherals including an Ethernet MAC. It shares pins with the DVP camera and I designed this LAN8720 module which can be connected to the onboard FPC connector for camera. Let's see whether this will work.

BTW, the hw v0.3 design has been released. This is a minor revision which fixed a issue at USB connectors. There was one of the CC pins connected to the resistor which causes problem when connecting to a USB-PD DFP or DRP device. Now both CC pins are connected to resistors respectively.

The firmware configured to support the WiFi module (RTL8189ftv) is uploaded to the Github repository. You can use  insmod 8189fs to load it.

Throughput test of the module:

This preview of this major upgrade was announced weeks ago and now it is released. You can fetch the latest hardware design in the GitHub repository. Besides the long awaited support to WiFi, it also brought some minor improvements like the FEL button and ESD protection.

Test with rtl8189ftv:

The original firmware needs some modification to support using sdc2 as SDIO interface (mainly in the device tree) but now there are still some minor issues in my compiled firmware. I will update it as soon as the problem is solved.

I was working on this major revision of board design for a few days, and managed to put a Wi-Fi module upon the SPI-Flash. Besides the support of Wi-Fi, there are also some enhancements in this version:

• Added a button for switching to FEL mode (BROM program of Allwinner)
• Added ESD protection for USB and audio jacks
• Some routing optimization

I have just ordered boards of this new version, and the design will be updated on GitHub once I have done the verification.

I have just uploaded a Tina Linux image to the Github repository. I have also written a Quick Start with the instruction for flashing.

To make use of IOs in the LCD port easier, this expansion board converts all nets from FPC to 2.54mm pin headers with labeled IO indices. For 24pin DVP port, there is also an expansion board but with no labels.

I have amended a script which helps generate Debian rootfs conveniently and it now works for riscv64. Due to the  limited resource on D1s, stuff like building software are more easily handled in a chroot environment on a powerful host with the help of QEMU. Try build it yourself by cloning this repository.

To reduce the cost and complexity, thisboard has neither onboard WiFi module, nor GMAC. There is still an easy approach to access the Internet, though: share the network with a computer via RNDIS Gadget. With the Internet access and the package manager mentioned in the previous log, massive packages in the software source are available to us now.

The second board has been made and tested. As you may noticed, the chip has the mark on the second board, which was erased on the first sample of chips I received due to confidentiality reasons.

Due to the lack of mainline support, D1s can only boot up the tina Linux, an OpenWRT fork by All Winner with relatively limited functionality. By chroot to an Ubuntu base filesystem, we can have the same experience as on a popular distro on it now. And the most exciting is that, we have the package manager to install anything we want!