So I heard about these all over Reddit, and just HAD to try them out. Video link here if you want to jump straight to the action! The specs are awesome though;
- Dual-Core RISC-V 64-bit processor
- 64MB DDR2 RAM
- TF/microSD & SPI flash storage options
- 10/100 ethernet PHY built in (exposed via header pads/pins)
- Some TPU apparently
- 26 GPIOs covering I2C, ADC, PWM, UART, SPI, SDIO
- USB-C power, data and RNDIS
- 5V Input via pins or USB-C
- 3.3V 2A output one pin which is very handy
- Low-battery detection via the ‘RUN’ pin aka PWR_VBAT_DET
- CSI 2-lane MIPI
- Hardware H.264/H.265 encoding
- Surface-mount compatible (nothing on the bottom side)
So I wired one up, and it was actually SUPER easy to use. I was damn impressed after the complexities with the Ox64. I did however try to power it with 24V POE using a 5V step-down and killed it…. Then killed the second one when recording the video. Here it is pretty much all wired up, and still working at this point;
I’ve got more coming, and they’re available for sale in my online store if need be – I buy 10-20 of these smaller items at a time to get a shipping advantage for other Aussie’s.
The biggest thing to note here is that this is hardware revision 1.2, as shown on the back of the board, so some things in the doco. Check the video description for links to the guides, datasheets, etc.
I am going to put this in the ‘SBC’ category as you can do CSI to HDMI for video output, it’s got microphone pins (where the smiley face is behind the USB connector), and if you don’t do audio-over-HDMI you can also use one or two analogue pins along with a little amplifier like Adafruit offers!
Here’s the inline video to finish it off;