Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

beaglev.seeed.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 311 posts

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#181

Post by bsder »

tjoff wrote: post #175
bsder wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an alternative to the RPi that has an eMMC. It's called a Beaglebone. And everybody bitches that the board is too expensive.

It doesn't have the same ecosystem. Which is half the point of the rpi to start with. But if you vouch for it I'll take a closer look.

> It doesn't have the same ecosystem. Which is half the point of the rpi to start with.

Now that's a valid argument. And I would argue it's way more than half.

If you want a one-off mumblesomething and can stay at the Linux OS level (ie. Web application, USB peripherals or maybe the most basic of GPIOs), the RPi ecosystem is going to let you get there much faster even though it will crash and burn occasionally. If that's "good enough" ... Douzou! ... Ganbatte! ... get moving and get going.

I have the same comment about Arduino. It ain't real reliable (but, to be fair, it's quite a bit more reliable than the RPis), but the ecosystem is awesome.

However, when you start asking something like "Gee, how do I send a single address byte over the I2C subsystem?" or "That signal needs a response in 50 nanoseconds, can I make that work?" you will thank the TI folks for producing that 5000 page (not joking or exaggerating) Technical Reference Manual.

One other thing that people who live in the RPi system always overlook in the Beagle ecosystem are the PRU cores. You can do HARD real-time work on those and still live in the Linux world. That's something that the RPi series just simply cannot do no matter how much you hack at them. And it often means the difference between a design which needs an FPGA and one that doesn't.

However, yes, you are going to live in that Technical Reference Manual for the Beagle series. If you're not comfortable doing that, then the Beagle stuff probably isn't for you.

There are really good reasons to use and love RPi's--ease of use is huge. But the whole "It's cheaper" thing just chaps my hide.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#182

Post by jschwartzi »

monocasa wrote: post #127
numpad0 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SD in itself isn't technically unreliable. Lots of smartphones do just fine with eMMC, which is same thing as microSD card except in nonstandard IC chip form thus can't carry SD branding.

Practically they end up being really different. SD Cards end up being bottom of the barrel flash chips (even from the 'good' brands), whereas eMMC uses flash good enough that you can count on it being non replaceable. You want "industrial" cards from a vendor tailored to the space. I wouldn't trust even those new industrial sandisk cards.

Yeah as someone who has deployed SD-based and eMMC-based systems in industrial spaces, SD cards are hot garbage compared to eMMC and I would strongly recommend not using them in anything that needs to be reliable.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#183

Post by jononor »

pedrocr wrote: post #166
monocasa wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, a decent audio DAC pretty much requires another chip since it takes up a ton of die space, so you'd be an absolute fool to use the same process node as your logic. Since this looks to be beagleboard compatible, you should be able to use an audio cape like this https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-67906/l/beagleb... If you don't care about it being decent, you can just use the PWM channels like the RPi doe…

I don't really want audio. What I'm looking for is to read 3.3V or 5V analog levels, with really low frequency, once a second or less would be fine.

Many cheap and easy to interface I2C and SPI chips for that, which is the way the industry is going generally. Or throw in a tiny Arduino with stock Firmata firmware, and use that as an I/O extender.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#184

Post by anderspitman »

deepGem wrote: post #36
rwmj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly unlikely to be very competitive. At this stage it's about getting RISC-V hardware into developers' hands, and previous boards either cost $1000 or were limited in ways where they could not run Linux well. (I am one of the Fedora/RISC-V maintainers.)

Just saw this SiFive board HiFive is retailing for $679, can you please comment if this is any good for toying around ? Specs look more than decent - almost desktop class computing. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched

Looks like you can get it from Mouser for $665 as well:

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/SiFive/HF105-000?qs=zW3...

Found that link from this SiFive page:

https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#185

Post by lsllc »

TrueDuality wrote: post #115

I've been unable to use Beagle boards in the past as they ship with an old kernel and uboot without the sources to update or config them (this was specifically with the black variant). It probably had something to do with vendor NDAs with chipsets or something but it made them entirely unusable to me and more expensive than competitors by almost 2x to boot. I would love a RISC-V board to play with that is a bit more…

Robert C. Nelson has been doing a stellar job of maintaining the omap-image-builder repo:

https://github.com/RobertCNelson/omap-image-builder

(and https://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu)

It's pretty easy to use to build an image for Debian Buster/Stretch or Ubuntu Bionic Beaver, he has various configurations that cover IoT, console only/headless, GUI and a few other combos. It's pretty easy to create your own config with the Kernel and packages that you want.

The images can be used for flashing to the eMMC via an SD card (or via USB).

I've found images built this way to up very up to date and absolutely rock solid thanks to Robert's curation.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#186

Post by lsllc »

wiremine wrote: post #72
sradman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although the first hardware run will be entirely $140 / 8GiB systems, lower-cost variants with less RAM are expected in following releases. > The initial pilot run of BeagleV will use the Vision DSP hardware as a graphics processor, allowing a full graphical desktop environment under Fedora. Following hardware runs will include an unspecified model of Imagine GPU as well. Sounds like a direct competitor to the Rasp…

> Sounds like a direct competitor to the Raspberry Pi. I would consider the Black and Green to be competitors too. https://beagleboard.org/ Would be really interested to get a good analysis of the Raspberry Pi, BB Black, and this new board.

Regarding the BBB/BBG, in the last 3-5 years the RPis have gotten significantly faster (RPi3 & 4) and gone 64-bit whereas the BBB & BBG haven't changed much (aside from a bit more eMMC and a very minor CPU bump) since they were launched. These days the 1GHZ 32-bit AM3358 (BBB RevC) is comparatively much slower and with only 512MB RAM, that's a lot less than a stock RPi 4.

Having said that, the BBBs are a great device! They're rock solid and have far better I/O options than the RPi: 4 UARTS, multiple I2C, SPI & CAN buses, EHRPWM, a ton of GPIO, 2x PRU processors, LCD driver, both USB and USB Gadget, oh and of course, the onboard eMMC is great compared to booting from an SD.

So I'm psyched about the Beagle-V.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#187

Post by wheybags »

This looks really awesome. It's been a longstanding desire of mine to build a custom laptop with one of these powerful small SOCs (originally thought of something like the lattepanda, which is similar to an Intel macbook air, but as a slightly bigger tan pi soc).

Would be super awesome to do it with riscv

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#188

Post by bradstewart »

TrueDuality wrote: post #115

I've been unable to use Beagle boards in the past as they ship with an old kernel and uboot without the sources to update or config them (this was specifically with the black variant). It probably had something to do with vendor NDAs with chipsets or something but it made them entirely unusable to me and more expensive than competitors by almost 2x to boot. I would love a RISC-V board to play with that is a bit more…

The biggest reason I used them in production devices (and still use them at home) was the eMMC. Which made it well worth the price, even with the slow processor.

We had to work with the Balena.io (formerly resin.io) team to get full hardware support on the BealgeBone Green Wireless (wifi drivers were the biggest hangup, iirc) a few years, but they were incredibly responsive and have done a fantastic job maintaining a stable distro for these boards.

If you want a straightforward out-of-the-box experience, I highly recommend Balena.io.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#189

Post by mlyle »

mrweasel wrote: post #53

Is there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA/M.2 port to board like this? The RaspberryPi is also "disk-less", which to me is one of the major limitations. It's a super interesting little board, and I love that it's a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don't know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card…

No, not too complicated, though connectors of all kinds take lots of space (both physical space and routing). Not to mention the amount of power that SATA drives might take.

HardKernel/ODroid has things like the oDroid-HC4.

Also, USB3-to-SATA isn't completely crazy to do.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#190

Post by IshKebab »

brucehoult wrote: post #97
IshKebab wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to ARM, nothing significant. They're very similar load-store architectures. Here's a RISC-V quick reference: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1617/ECAD+Arch/files/docs/... And ARM: http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~valvano/Volume1/QuickReferenceC... The main difference is that RISC-V is a lot more modular, so it's going to be difficult to distribute binaries for but more flexible if you're doing something comple…

If you're doing something embedded nothing prevents you implementing multiply but not divide. RISC-V gcc has an option to use an instruction for multiply but runtime library call for divide. In fact, even if you claim to implement the M extension (both multiply and divide) all that is necessary is that programs using those opcode work -- but that can be via trap and emulate. If your overall system can run binaries wi…

Yeah if you're willing to do something completely non-standard of course you can do whatever you want.

> Note that there are also vast differences in performance between different hardware implementations of multiply and divide, with 32-64 cycle latencies not unheard of.

Yes that is exactly the problem.

Post reply on HN