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

261–270 of 311 posts

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

#261

Post by qchris »

Youden wrote: post #198
qchris wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, I really wish that these boards would include more than two PWM outputs. The Raspberry Pi has two as well, and it feels really limiting. Analog control instead gets farmed out to microcontrollers, when you could probably make it work with a single board if there were more pins to work with.

I'm curious, what do you do with so many PWM outputs? I just play with electronics for side projects but stick to digital for everything, so I'm wondering what I'm missing out on.

Honestly, I'm still mostly getting started in the area as well, but I'm looking to use them for motor control. An example of this would be this paper [1], which I'm hoping to replicate to some degree, but requires at least 4 PWM outputs. I'm currently planning on using an Odroid-C4, which has 6 PWM outputs.

But the work I've needed to put into that in order to get a motor controller working was way more than I needed than for a RPi4b, since libraries for it already exist for the Pi vs needing to re-write them for the Odroid board. It would have been cool to try it with an open-hardware board as well. But it's not just quadcopters--a lot of other projects like rovers or position control with multiple stepper on different axes benefit from extra PWM, and doing it in software can lead to too much jitter, so the hardware timers are necessary.

[1] https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:946992/FULLTEXT0...

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

#262

Post by pabs3 »

monocasa wrote: post #132
pabs3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, ImgTec are planning on writing and upstreaming open drivers for Linux and mesa for another RISC-V based board, so probably those drivers will work here too. https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/picorio-the-raspberry-pi-like...

I don't think that necessarily says that ImgTec will be upstreaming the open drivers, more that they don't have a better option at the moment and will be replacing closed source components with each revision. I hope they will, but I'll believe it when I see it. They've been extremely allergic to open source in the past.

The post specifically says upstreaming open drivers, here is a quote:

Imagination is also creating a new open-source GPU driver to provide a complete, up-streamed open-source kernel and user-mode driver stack to support Vulkan® and OpenGL® ES within the Mesa framework. It will be openly developed with intermediate milestones visible to the open-source community and a complete open-source Linux driver will be delivered by Q2 2022. Imagination will work with RIOS to run the open-source GPU driver on the PicoRio open-source platform.

I agree it seems like quite a change of heart and I definitely won't be holding my breath.

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

#263

Post by pabs3 »

stragies wrote: post #149
pabs3 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ImgTec are planning on writing and upstreaming open drivers for Linux and mesa for another RISC-V based board, so probably those drivers will work here too. https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/picorio-the-raspberry-pi-like...

Haven't they been promising that since about 3 years? As far as I know, that never materialized.

I hadn't seen that promise before, so it was pretty surprising to me. I'll be happy to see links to earlier versions of the promise.

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

#264

Post by megous »

adrianstoll wrote: post #221
megous wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using f2fs and setting up the SW on my SBCs to not write data needlessly to SD card all the time (some programs are really bad at this), and having a very high quality power supply and cabling was enough to make my boards work for years on a single SD card. Some are at 4 years currently and still work fine. I'm using Sandisk only, since a few years ago, because it's the only manufacturer that allows me to verify onli…

Samsung provides authentication software for their sd cards too.

Now that's interesting. I have a few dead samsung uSD cards, that I'd check for genuineness, if possible. I suspect they might have been a cheap clone.

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/...

I guess too little too late. None of the 4 dead Samsung cards I could find have the V mark (too old for that), required for validation, and they probably started adding support for regular EVO cards just a year ago or so.

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

#265

Post by megous »

znpy wrote: post #228
adrianstoll wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung provides authentication software for their sd cards too.

does it run on linux or do i need windows to run that? because if windows is needed then sandisk can get a chunk of my salary.

It's a windows tool.

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

#266

Post by monocasa »

pabs3 wrote: post #262
monocasa wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that necessarily says that ImgTec will be upstreaming the open drivers, more that they don't have a better option at the moment and will be replacing closed source components with each revision. I hope they will, but I'll believe it when I see it. They've been extremely allergic to open source in the past.

The post specifically says upstreaming open drivers, here is a quote: Imagination is also creating a new open-source GPU driver to provide a complete, up-streamed open-source kernel and user-mode driver stack to support Vulkan® and OpenGL® ES within the Mesa framework. It will be openly developed with intermediate milestones visible to the open-source community and a complete open-source Linux driver will be delivere…

That'll be interesting to see how much is actually new. I'm pretty sure they licensed the core of their shader compiler stack, so there was no way it was going to just be opened up, but their GPU ukernel looks totally homegrown and would be a shame to throw away.

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

#267

Post by qwerty456127 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #259
cogman10 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I just wish there was a faster standard than SD. 100MB/s for solid state is just incredibly slow now-a-days. There's no reason you couldn't kick SD transfer speeds up towards SSD speeds other than the protocol doesn't allow for it.

The existence of Raspberry Pi as it is, Raspberry Pi 4 in parricular, is is a huge leap forward for the humanity already. The next leap is going to be the same kind of board but with no connectors besides an increasing number of full Thunderbolt 4 ports letting you connect anything you can imagine (incl as many GPIO connectors as you need). There is no need in a zoo of connectors like M.2, U.2, SATA, HDMI etc when we…

By the way, switching to a single super-fast (for the time) connector for everything (including internal hard drives) was already anticipated before the invention of SATA and even USB2 - FireWire (IEEE 1394) was meant for that.

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

#268

Post by jandrese »

monocasa wrote: post #247
jandrese wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a market for people who will pay extra for SD cards that: 1. Absolutely don't lie about their capacity 2. Have a reasonable MTBF 3. Are reliably fast But instead we're all dealing with an industry that raced to the bottom years ago. I'm concerned that the same mentality will infect the eMMC market eventually and it will become impossible to find quality parts after a couple of years.

What you're asking for does exist in the industrial market (and I'm skeptical of those 'industrial' branded sandisk cards). They still use pseudo SLC (storing one bit in every flash cell as 00(0) or 11(1) and correcting up or down on read back). They also will work with you so you can track BOM changes as they internally change the cards so you can track failure rates. They also give you access to tons of internal pe…

Worth it if you're installing something like a Raspberry Pi in a ceiling mount screen that's a pain to access.

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

#269

Post by CameronNemo »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #174
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 ubuntu on bbb team keeps up to date with the latest LTS kernels. There is 5.4 support and 5.10 support is in progress. The price wasn't so bad if you're in for the feature set (mainly the IO features). Using the embedded PRU controllers can replace the arduinos ones typically connects to their RPi. However, BBB is very old now. A single core cortex-A8 is abysmally slow. Getting the GPU working was always a pain.…

The rk3328 board I have has been great. Quad Cortex A53, up to 4 GB of RAM, Mali GPU.

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

#270

Post by CameronNemo »

panny wrote: post #254
jstgord wrote: post #240

Does anyone have informed opinion about the usability / value / relevance / quality of the Neural network support on this chip ? Their page mentions spec with : • SiFive U74 RISC-V Dual core with 2MB L2 cache @ 1.5GHz • Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision • NVDLA Engine (configuration 2048 MACs@800MHz ) • Neural Network Engine (1024MACs@500MHz) So this board seems to have some great support for neural net /…

If it has driver/firmware blobs, I'll say no thanks and stick to my ARM Rockchips. If they deliver this on linux with full source code, I will definitely buy their boards.

New Rockchip boards are coming with neural processing units.
Post reply on HN