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So this $10 FPGA devboard has what I thought was an FT2232D chip for USB, but no! It is actually a BL702, Sipeed's 'debug chip', a RISC-V SOC...
BL702 is highly integrated BLE and Zigbee combo chipset for IoT applications, contains 32-bit RISC-V CPU with FPU, frequency up to 144MHz, with 132KB RAM and 192 KB ROM, 1Kb eFuse, 512KB embedded Flash, USB2.0 FS device interface, and many other features.
I suppose it's not as weird as, say, an ARM7 SOC on every SD card... I still find it jarring to find embedded hardware capable of playing DOOM replacing what should be a level converter at most.
Although USB is a stupid and convoluted protocol, so it makes sense that you need 1000x the power of say Apollo control computer to move a few bytes around...
Jul 10 · 6 weeks ago
Sounds interesting. What have you got planned for it at the mo?
🚀 stack [OP/mod] · Jul 10 at 17:13:
@drh3xx: as for the RISC-V SOC, I found a thread on how to flash it on some devices (not sure about 1K), and it involves some bricking risk...I think Sipeed sells some low-cost SOC boards with no FPGAs.
As for the Nano1K board, mostly scratching an itch - it's been about a decade since I hacked up an Apple ][ in a Xess XC3S1000 board and a bunch of strange FPGA tools. I wanted to make sure I at least still remember Verilog.
And doing some hardware makes a good break from software. There is a finiteness about it. And it's lower down (although there is plenty of room to go down from verilog -- that's why I usually instantiate stuff even in verilog)...
🚀 stack [OP/mod] · Jul 10 at 17:21:
The Maix board with just the BL702 RISC-V chip is around $7 on Aliexpress (as opposed to $11 for the Nano1K with the FPGA)
I wish the protectionist a-holes would stop it with the stupid tariffs on China. It's not like any US company is going to sell $3.00 boards! Sadly no matter who gets elected, things will not get better here.