> It looks like a microcontroller, but behaves like a UNIX machine.
While a great achievement and very interesting article, the same can be said from many RTOS that offer POSIX compatibility.
The $8 Linux Computer
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Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#12English language BL808 data sheets:
https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_DS/en...
https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_docs/blob/main/BL808_RM/en...
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#13what is the memory management unit supposed to do on embedded computers? I'd rather like one for 5$ without mmu.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#14There's another post on HN several days back with similarly price Sipeed M1s that's based on the same Bouffalo Lab BL808 RISC-V SoC module including NPU providing support for WiFi/BL, 802.15.4 Zigbee connectivity and interfaces such as UART, I2C, SPI, etc: $10.80 RISC-V AIoT module supports Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874032 EDIT: This is the official website for the Sipeed M1s showcasing the specs…
Wooha, thats kind of awesome. Does this mean you could make your own zigbee sensors or whatever?
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#15There's another post on HN several days back with similarly price Sipeed M1s that's based on the same Bouffalo Lab BL808 RISC-V SoC module including NPU providing support for WiFi/BL, 802.15.4 Zigbee connectivity and interfaces such as UART, I2C, SPI, etc: $10.80 RISC-V AIoT module supports Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874032 EDIT: This is the official website for the Sipeed M1s showcasing the specs…
Wooha, thats kind of awesome. Does this mean you could make your own zigbee sensors or whatever?
You can already do that with all kinds of boards. You don’t necessarily need it to run Linux.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#16There's another post on HN several days back with similarly price Sipeed M1s that's based on the same Bouffalo Lab BL808 RISC-V SoC module including NPU providing support for WiFi/BL, 802.15.4 Zigbee connectivity and interfaces such as UART, I2C, SPI, etc: $10.80 RISC-V AIoT module supports Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874032 EDIT: This is the official website for the Sipeed M1s showcasing the specs…
Wooha, thats kind of awesome. Does this mean you could make your own zigbee sensors or whatever?
I would think that Zephyr would be better suited for this. Linux is great for many things, but it can also be overkill.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#17"[currently out of stock, restock on January 2023]"
That is all that needs to be said about this...
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#18"[currently out of stock, restock on January 2023]" That is all that needs to be said about this...
That's 2 weeks time
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#19Based on a brief bit of googling about this board's CPU (the Bouffalo Lab BL808), it seems to have one RV64 and two RV32 cores. The RV64 core may be capable of running RV32 machine code, if the OS sets various flags correctly, but the reverse isn't possible without emulation. How does Linux handle this? Can you just run an executable and have it automatically scheduled onto whichever cores can execute it? Wouldn't th…
One proposal I saw was to treat the RV32 core like a microcontroller or as a dedicated co-processor. https://www.robertlipe.com/bl808-not-symmetric/
Let me see if I have this straight ... it's a device that can run a general OS like Linux, but say, have a core that could be run real-time, with all the goodies like timers and stuff that we expect from microcontrollers?
If so, then that would be pretty awesome. I think that people have been trying to get real-time working on Raspberry Pis. It seems that they get kinda close, but never manage to get all the way.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#20what is the memory management unit supposed to do on embedded computers? I'd rather like one for 5$ without mmu.
This chip has 4 cores, and I believe they all share the same memory bus ie. Each core can access the 64GB ram directly. There is also 768K sram for low power use. Only the RV64 large core has an mmu, the two RV32 cores don't. I think the chip's main use could be robotics- the lowest power core for networking, npu for image processing, the mid core for simple tasks and the large core for Linux and complex tasks eg. Navigation.
With the shared memory bus, you can hand over tasks between the cores. You may not have the same software running on each core, but the data can be the same.
For your use then, you could just use the lowest power microcontroller with 64GB ram. You can't get that ability anywhere else.