RISC-V Open-source Hardware and Resource Roundup at Seeed Studio

What is RISC-V Foundation?

RISC-V  is a free and open ISA enabling a new era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration. 

The RISC- V Foundation is a non-profit entity serving members and the industry and was originally developed in the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

2020 update:

Another All-in-One Platform with Rich Peripherals of Sipeed RISC-V 64 Family: Amigo!

SIPEED Maix Amigo is an all-in-one programmable AIoT development kit that can be used for AI and IoT learning.

• Built-in RV64GC RISC-V 64-bit 400Mhz dual-core high-performance processor with 8M on-chip SRAM and 16MiB FLASH storage.
• Equipped with 2 cameras, TF card slot, user buttons, TFT capacitive touch screen, lithium battery, speaker, microphone, 2 USB ports, and an expansion interface.
  

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We released this amazing All-in-One AI Development Platform Based on K210 (RISC-V) on April. 17th 2020: Sipeed MaixCube

Sipeed MaixCube is an all-in-one development platform based on the M1n module which is powered by the Kendryte K210 core. It is equipped with a camera, TF card slot, user buttons, TFT display, lithium battery, speaker, microphone and an expansion interface. This provides a great platform for everyone to start learning about AI development. 

Object recognition using Artificial Intelligence has never been this convenient ever before. We also released the Sipeed AI forum area, where we will publish relevant resources from time to time. You are welcome to ask questions and communicate in the forum area. Let us know what more products and tutorials you are looking forward to!

Also thanks to the tutorial How to Build & Run Linux on Kendryte K210 RISC-V NOMMU Processor via CNX SOFTWARE – EMBEDDED SYSTEMS NEWS

Now not only you can run Linux on RISC-V hardware, explore more RISC-V products at Seeed!

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New Release: Kittenbot KOI AI Module Based on K210 (RISC-V) – Supported by Micro:bit/Arduino/Raspberry Pi

Want to add AI functionalities to your Micro:bit, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi projects? KOI got you covered. It simply adds an AI brain to your projects.

• KOI is an Artificial Intelligence module that can be programmed graphically and used offline.
• The hardware includes a camera, microphone, speaker, IPS screen, Wi-Fi, and much more.
• Featuring K210 RISC-V 64-bit Dual-Core CPU for Powerful AI Applications
• Ability to self-train on the module itself with the support of importing pre-trained models

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2019 Update:

Recently RISC-V and GigaDevice announced the GD32V Series, which is said to be the world’s first 32-bit general-purpose microcontroller based on the RISC-V core.

Today we released Longan Nano development board powered by GD32VF103CBT6 MCU today and it only costs $4.90. 

Sipeed Longan Nano is a development board based on GD32VF103CBT6 MCU with RISC-V 32-bit core of GigaDevice.
It is convenient for students, engineers and geek enthusiasts to contact the new-generation RISC-V processor.
Longan Nano comes with a 0.96inch 160×80 IPS RGB LCD and an acrylic transparent case.

Besides Longan Nano, let’s through back to take a look at what happened about RISC -V at Seeed Studio in 2019. Please don’t forget our full selection of Sipeed products, which will help you a lot to getting started with AI projects in a cost-effective way.

February – $7.9 RISC-V Module – Sipeed MAIX-I module w/o WiFi ( 1st RISC-V 64 AI Module, K210 inside )

MAIX is Sipeed’s purpose-built module designed to run AI at the edge, we called it AIoT. It delivers high performance in a small physical and power footprint, enabling the deployment of high-accuracy AI at the edge, and the competitive price make it possible embed to any IoT devices. As you see, Sipeed MAIX is quite like Google edge TPU, but it act as master controller, not an accelerator like edge TPU, so it is more low cost and low power than AP+edge TPU solution.

RISC-V is the new hotness, and companies are churning out code and announcements. Eventually, RISC-V microcontrollers and SoCs will cost just a few bucks. This day might be here, with Seeed’s Sipeed MAix modules. it’s a RISC-V chip you can buy right now, the bare module costs eight US dollars, there are several modules, and it has “AI.”

Hackaday Article: New Part Day: A RISC-V CPU For Eight Dollars
DATE:FEBRUARY 15, 2019

March – Grove AI HAT for Edge Computing

Next, in March, we released Grove AI HAT.

The Grove AI HAT for Edge Computing is built around Sipeed MAix M1 AI MODULE with Kendryte K210 processor inside. It’s a low cost but powerful raspberry pi AI hat which assists raspberry pi run the AI at the edge, it also can work independently for edge computing applications. 

The MAix M1 is a powerful RISC-V 600MHz AI module that features dual-core 64-bit CPU, 230GMULps 16-bit KPU(Neural Network Processor), FPU(Float Point Unit) supports DP&SP, and APU(Audio Processor) supports 8 mics. In addition to the powerful Kendryte K210 processor, the Grove AI HAT for Edge Computing board provides a wealth of peripherals: I2C/UART/SPI/I2S/PWM/GPIO. The HAT also offers an LCD and a camera interface, which supports the Sipeed 2.4inch QVGA LCD and DVP camera, it will be helpful and convenience with your AI vision project. 

It’s a low cost but powerful raspberry pi AI hat which assists raspberry pi run the AI at the edge, it also can work independently for edge computing applications. The MAix M1 is a powerful RISC-V 600MHz AI module that features dual-core 64-bit CPU, 230GMULps 16-bit KPU(Neural Network Processor), FPU(Float Point Unit) supports DP&SP, and APU(Audio Processor) supports 8 mics. In addition to the powerful Kendryte K210 processor, the Grove AI HAT for Edge Computing board provides a wealth of peripherals: I2C/UART/SPI/I2S/PWM/GPIO. The hat also offers an LCD and a camera interface, which supports the Sipeed 2.4inch QVGA LCD and DVP camera, it will be helpful and convenience with your AI vision project. 

There’s actually been a lot of support work done by Kendryte around the K210, including support for FreeRTOS and TensorFlow, and the Sipeed MAix module, with MicroPython support and documentation. So it’s really rather intriguing to see Seeed Studio preparing themselves to offer it as a Raspberry Pi HAT.

Hackster.io Article: A New RISC-V-Based AI HAT For The Raspberry Pi From Seeed Studio
DATE:MARCH 8, 2019

We designed a face counter-demo to show you how to perform fast, accurate face detection with pre-trained deep learning face detector model.

April – PlatformIO IDE supports Maix (k210) Series development board released!

PlatformIO is a super convenient cross-platform open source Internet of Things hardware integration development environment that supports a variety of platforms 30, more than 630 clock integrated development development board. PIO also has a wealth of third-party library support, just a simple few steps you can easily configure the development environment. 
Now Maix Series development board has the blessing of the PIO IDE, can support development in kendryte-standalone-sdk and Arduino.

Tutorial: https://platformio.org/platforms/kendryte210

Project: https://github.com/sipeed/platform-kendryte210

Project: https://github.com/sipeed/platform-kendryte210

May – ArduinoCore-k210 released

Since the release of Seeeduino in 2008, Seeed has been contributing software to the Arduino community. After we released Grove AI HAT, we released new software: ArduinoCore-k210. help uses run Arduino libraries on K210 based boards such as Grove AI HAT.

Based on kendryte-standalone-sdk, we added the full ArduinoCore-API interface to support Arduino IDE, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and other development environments. With the support of the ArduinoCore-k210, all k210-based development boards can run Grove Arduino Library and many excellent Arduino libraries in the community of Arduino.

Here’s how to use the ArduinoCore-k210:

We have further optimized the user experience of the software, and we hope that beginners of the Arduino Uno/Arduino Zero will be able to get started with our hardware without complex learning process because the software we provide is the Arduino interface you are familiar with, however, the hardware is brand new, adding more playability and exploratory.

More about K210:

K210 brief:

• Image Recognition with hardware acceleration
• Dual core with FPU
• 8MB(6MB+2MB) RAM
• 16MB external Flash
• Max 800MHz CPU freq (see the dev board in detail)
• Microphone array(8 mics)
• Hardware AES SHA256
• FPIOA (Periphrals can map to any pins)
• Peripherals: I2C, SPI, I2S, WDT, TIMER, RTC, UART, GPIO etc.

Later, Maixduino was released, a RISC-V 64 development board, to help Arduino users to build their AI projects.

Excited to share with everyone! #Maixduino was just released a few minutes ago! https://t.co/b3kh3o74am
Maixduino is a @risc_v 64 development board for AI + IoT applications. It was designed in an @arduino Uno form factor, with #ESP32 module on board together with MAIX AI module pic.twitter.com/SwGDSPO75w

— Seeed Studio (@seeedstudio) May 22, 2019

Based on MAIX Module, the Maixduino is a RISC-V 64 development board for AI + IoT applications. Different from other Sipeed MAIX dev. boards, Maixduino was designed in an Arduino Uno form factor, with ESP32 module on board together with MAIX AI module.

Maixduino will help you extend AI function in the following applications:

•  Smart Home applications like robot cleaners, smart speakers, electronic door locks, household monitoring etc.
•  Medical Industry applications like Auxiliary diagnosis and treatment, medical image recognition, emergency alarm etc.
• Smart Industry applications like industrial machinery, intelligent sorting, monitoring of electrical equipment, etc.
• Education applications like educational robots, intelligent interactive platforms, educational efficiency inspection, etc.
• Agriculture applications like agricultural monitoring, pest and disease monitoring, automated control, etc.

June – Perf-V Based on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA RISC-V

While in theory you could use pretty much any FPGA board with enough logic elements, it may help to get started with boards that are designed for this purpose since the company already ported a RISC-V core to their platform and you can start from there.

JUNE 17, 2019 BY JEAN-LUC AUFRANC (CNXSOFT) 

Perf-V is a FPGA demo board designed for RISC-V opensource community by PerfXLab. It integrates various peripheral chips and offers many interfaces.

• It uses Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, Vivado software development,and is designed for the RISC-V open source community and FPGA learning enthusiasts design development board.
• It Integrates a variety of peripheral chips to provide a rich set of peripheral interfaces, including PMOD, Arduino, JTAG, UART interfaces, and high-speed interfaces for expansion of HDMI, VGA, USB2.0/3.0, camera, Bluetooth, expansion boards, etc. Strong flexibility.
• Based on Perf-V’s self-developed smart car, it can use mobile phone Bluetooth to control the movement of the car, and can realize automatic tracing and obstacle avoidance functions.

You can also choose another one with the chip XC7A100T-1FTG256C, which has more logic cells and CLBs.

What is the next board are you expecting? Please feel to let us know in the forum: New Product Ideas. We will carefully listen to and take action!

We will keep updating more resources and products we have released on this roundup blog. Please stay tuned and feel free to let us know what tests, tutorials, and add-ons you want to see for RISC-V and K210!

Reference:

How to Build & Run Linux on Kendryte K210 RISC-V NOMMU Processor – CNX SOFTWARE

sipeed/MaixPy – Github 

Maix (k210) Series development board has yet another new IDE blessing, PlatformIO IDE! – APRIL 29, 2019 by BITS

CNX Software Article: Maixduino SBC Combines RISC-V AI, Arduino Form Factor, And ESP32 Wireless Module – RISC -V News

Hackaday Article: New Part Day: A RISC-V CPU For Eight Dollars – RISC -V News

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