[HN Gopher] Boufallo Lab BL616/BL618 RISC-V MCU Supports WiFi 6,...
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Boufallo Lab BL616/BL618 RISC-V MCU Supports WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2,
and Zigbee
Author : zdw
Score : 44 points
Date : 2022-12-29 15:24 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnx-software.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnx-software.com)
| stavros wrote:
| Correction, it's Bouffalo.
| cnxsoft wrote:
| Hmm. I actually corrected the spellings two days ago, so I'm
| wondering why people are still seeing the old ones now. Caching
| must be involved, but accessing the website in a private
| windows shows the correct spellings to me.
| cnxsoft wrote:
| I see now, there should be a redirected to a new URL, but it
| only works as a logged in user. I'll have to check that
| out... Next year.
| tromp wrote:
| They managed to spell it three times correctly. Unfortunately,
| one of the two mis-spellings is right in the title:-(
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Specs don't really matter here... atleast not for hobbyists.
|
| Will it be supported within the arduino IDE? Will most other
| libraries work with it? Will I be able to buy it from aliexpress
| and other vendors in quantity of one (1) on an easily solderable
| board? How many lines of code does it take to do a simple http
| request?
|
| Why am I mentioning this? Look at arduino... relatively speaking
| it was a shitty chip, with low specs and not even that cheap...
| but it made it possible for a 13yo kid to make a running light
| example (KITT car leds from Knight Rider show) in basically five
| minutes. Arduino got replaced by esp8266 (and later esp32)
| because of wifi, but the led example stayed the same. No data
| sheets, no inline assembly, no registers, one pinMode() and
| digitalWrite() and it just worked.
|
| For professional hardware developers.. sure, they can read very
| long datasheets.. but millions of others just want and need
| something simple and the arduino (esp*) ecosystem manages to do
| just this.
| alex3305 wrote:
| Specs matter, but differently, at least for me. I don't need
| the best performing chip out there, I just want an efficient
| chip. I love having a simple ESP chip that I can connect some
| wires to and flash ESPHome on. When I was a kid I only dreamed
| of such simplicity and efficiency. Especially with things such
| as Raspberry Pi's, which makes DIY computing really affordable
| too.
| zokier wrote:
| Tbh I feel the opposite; hobbyists have ton of time to fiddle
| with weird underdocumented parts, while professionals are on
| the clock and need to have the parts work with their inhouse
| standard tools.
| rektide wrote:
| And the capabilities here are very alluring.
|
| There's definitely a camp of casual tinkerers & makers
| relying on well paved cowpaths.
|
| But imo yeah, I generally think hobbyists most interesting,
| best, & most notable character is willingness to fiddle.
| There's an equal sized camp of very good very advanced
| programmers who come here to dabble, but dabble hard, & they
| make & define the space.
|
| These folks often coupled with an excitement & interest in
| advanced cool new systems. Which this certainly certainly is.
| Roark66 wrote:
| It depends what you want to use it for. For me as a hobbyist
| specs definitely matter.
|
| But I woukd divide boards that I use into : mostly
| microcontrollers. Those are fine with a low clock if they have
| lots of hardware io (spi, uarts, pwm, i2c etc), or if they
| require bit banging they need a fast clock (rp2040).
|
| Then there are Sbcs like raspberry PiS, pine64 quartz 64 and
| this board. I use them for stuff that requires lots of
| processing power. Camera encode and send, emulate an old 8-bit
| computer, do object detection on camera feed, emulate a disk
| drive for a retro machine and so on.
|
| So good specs matter to me. Especially this 6Teraflops NPU.
| I've been using Google Edge TPU that has (supposedly) 4 Tops
| and it works great for medium resolution (720p) object
| detection. Of course I woukd prefer 40 tops and ability to plug
| nvme storage to run large AI let's say on a small drone, but
| even 6tops is very cool.
|
| It is a bit disappointing it has dvp camera interface only. Csi
| cameras are much more plentiful these days. Also no mention of
| camera isp latency makes me think it will be unusable for real
| time use (I would love to have "<20ms" or approximately one
| frame of latency).
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| For me, there are three categories:
|
| 1. If I need a microcontroller (e.g. low power or lots of
| interfacing with other hardware), it's the ESP32 if the board
| I get can handle it. Saving a few bucks to go with something
| cheaper doesn't make sense, and I can have a small stockpile
| so I don't have to delay a new idea to wait for Aliexpress.
| Haven't tried bitbanging, which is non-trivial due to the
| complexity of the chip, but apparently
| (https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=713) it's doable.
|
| 2. If I want to run Linux on it, it's a Raspberry Pi. The
| supply chain issues this year really messed with it, but I'm
| a huge fan of using something that's as standard as possible,
| instead of figuring out the quirks of a new platform each
| time and trying to find which accessories are compatible with
| what.
|
| 3. Regular computer. Probably in a VM or a cloud at that
| point.
| fragmede wrote:
| Re 2. I mean the supply chain issues are real and something
| like the ODROID is in stock and isn't all that different.
| It depends on your use case and how adaptable you are. I
| need a Pi-ish computer sooner than they're going to work
| out their supply chain.
|
| Also buyer beware - their new Pi Pico series is a
| microcontroller with no MMU and not something that runs
| Linux like the Pi Zero.
| unwind wrote:
| The chip in TFA is definitely described as being a
| microcontroller (that's the MCU in the title after all).
|
| Sure it's 32-bit and 300+ MHz but I don't think it runs SCB-
| level OSs like Linux. Didn't see any mention of an MMU.
| fragmede wrote:
| Pardon me, but what is SCB? Googling didn't turn up
| anything relevant.
| unwind wrote:
| Yes, sorry should have been SBC for single-board
| computer. Was outside, fingers cold. Happy new year!
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Likely a misspelling of SBC or single board computer.
| [deleted]
| noninc wrote:
| I'd argue specs really do matter. There is several points to
| make:
|
| Firstly hobbyists are really a spectrum. Anything in between an
| retired pro to a child playing with point resistor legs can be
| called hobbyists, and it is people from within this spectrum
| who make it accessible to others and advancing what is possible
| for someone without a lab and funding.
|
| Having cheaply available hardware with at least good enough
| datasets drives this.
|
| In my mind we shouldn't argue a blinking KARR is enough for a
| child. This is the argument for regression. We should think
| what a child's mind can come up with, if we make those recent
| things accessible to them.
|
| Coming back to specs: CNXSoft is one of those sites that maps
| new features, technologies that we can use to hardware that
| becomes available. It is the inspiration to those higher level
| hobbyists to make the tools for the beginners.
| zoobab wrote:
| "Will it be supported within the arduino IDE?"
|
| Well it's just a RISCV core which you can compile code with
| GCC, so I guess adding support to the Arduino IDE will be
| pretty easy. The wifi part is probably binary like other chips,
| but that did not prevent ESP8266/32 support in Arduino IDE.
| bri3d wrote:
| Compiling code is the easy part, peripheral drivers which
| implement both the basic Arduino functions (digitalWrite and
| so on and so forth) and more advanced stuff like SPI/I2C,
| WiFi, etc. are necessary to make a working "Arduino
| ecosystem."
|
| I think the reason that ESP was so successful is they
| provided both a working Arduino standard library so that
| sketches could just be copy-pasted from other platforms, and
| a reasonably decent real RTOS-backed development environment
| (ESP-IDF) for once users outgrew the Arduino training wheels.
| bpye wrote:
| > Why am I mentioning this? Look at arduino... relatively
| speaking it was a shitty chip, with low specs and not even that
| cheap...
|
| But critically it had a reasonable quality, free, open source,
| C compiler.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Less than $2 on a ready to use module.
| sylware wrote:
| I would have prefered a 64bits RISC-V cpu core, that, to share
| 64bits RISC-V (I know there is a good "compatibilty" between
| RISC-V 64bits ISA and 32bits ISA. "compatibilty"). My thought is:
| "Write 64bits RISC-V assembly once for all".
|
| And it is missing that USB-C connector on the board and the
| memory card slot for booting code.
|
| You'll tell me the pins are there, but then I am worried about
| the remaining count of usable GPIO pins.
| rjsw wrote:
| If you want a 64bit RISC-V CPU then look at the Ox64 [1] from
| PINE64.
|
| [1] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Ox64
| sylware wrote:
| Yep. Even if there is an extra 32bits risc-v cpu.
| Roark66 wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it. It'll likely be too expensive or
| permanently out of stock...
| rasz wrote:
| Isnt that the one they promised to open source but are shipping
| binary blobs instead?
| opan wrote:
| I recall Pine64 asking for help REing one of their chips. I
| don't remember hearing Bouffalo would liberate anything
| themselves.
| rasz wrote:
| https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_iot_sdk/issues/1
| MayeulC wrote:
| Support for Thread too! I eonder how hard it would be to build an
| yggdrasil (or similar, like pinecone) network on top of thread.
|
| I wish it had PIO similar to the Pi microcontroller though. These
| are game-changing for GPIO, I wonder if they are patented?
| bri3d wrote:
| PIO is supposedly patent pending.
|
| Other CPUs have similar ideas, but none in the hobby space that
| I'm aware of. For example, Infineon Tricore has PCP (Peripheral
| Control Processor), which is more advanced but serves an
| identical role - offloading time-critical pin manipulation
| interrupt service from the CPU to a dedicated IO coprocessor.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| With this type of chip use the proper term, "support".
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