Boufallo Lab BL616/BL618 RISC-V MCU Supports WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and Zigbee | Hacker News Reader

Boufallo Lab BL616/BL618 RISC-V MCU Supports WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and Zigbee

cnx-software.com

54 pointszdw32 comments

Specs don't really matter here... atleast not for hobbyists.

Will it be supported within the arduino IDE? Will most other libraries work with it? Will I be able to buy it from aliexpress and other vendors in quantity of one (1) on an easily solderable board? How many lines of code does it take to do a simple http request?

Why am I mentioning this? Look at arduino... relatively speaking it was a shitty chip, with low specs and not even that cheap... but it made it possible for a 13yo kid to make a running light example (KITT car leds from Knight Rider show) in basically five minutes. Arduino got replaced by esp8266 (and later esp32) because of wifi, but the led example stayed the same. No data sheets, no inline assembly, no registers, one pinMode() and digitalWrite() and it just worked.

For professional hardware developers.. sure, they can read very long datasheets.. but millions of others just want and need something simple and the arduino (esp*) ecosystem manages to do just this.

It depends what you want to use it for. For me as a hobbyist specs definitely matter.

But I woukd divide boards that I use into : mostly microcontrollers. Those are fine with a low clock if they have lots of hardware io (spi, uarts, pwm, i2c etc), or if they require bit banging they need a fast clock (rp2040).

Then there are Sbcs like raspberry PiS, pine64 quartz 64 and this board. I use them for stuff that requires lots of processing power. Camera encode and send, emulate an old 8-bit computer, do object detection on camera feed, emulate a disk drive for a retro machine and so on.

So good specs matter to me. Especially this 6Teraflops NPU. I've been using Google Edge TPU that has (supposedly) 4 Tops and it works great for medium resolution (720p) object detection. Of course I woukd prefer 40 tops and ability to plug nvme storage to run large AI let's say on a small drone, but even 6tops is very cool.

It is a bit disappointing it has dvp camera interface only. Csi cameras are much more plentiful these days. Also no mention of camera isp latency makes me think it will be unusable for real time use (I would love to have "<20ms" or approximately one frame of latency).

For me, there are three categories:

1. If I need a microcontroller (e.g. low power or lots of interfacing with other hardware), it's the ESP32 if the board I get can handle it. Saving a few bucks to go with something cheaper doesn't make sense, and I can have a small stockpile so I don't have to delay a new idea to wait for Aliexpress. Haven't tried bitbanging, which is non-trivial due to the complexity of the chip, but apparently (https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=713) it's doable.

2. If I want to run Linux on it, it's a Raspberry Pi. The supply chain issues this year really messed with it, but I'm a huge fan of using something that's as standard as possible, instead of figuring out the quirks of a new platform each time and trying to find which accessories are compatible with what.

3. Regular computer. Probably in a VM or a cloud at that point.

Re 2. I mean the supply chain issues are real and something like the ODROID is in stock and isn't all that different. It depends on your use case and how adaptable you are. I need a Pi-ish computer sooner than they're going to work out their supply chain.

Also buyer beware - their new Pi Pico series is a microcontroller with no MMU and not something that runs Linux like the Pi Zero.

The chip in TFA is definitely described as being a microcontroller (that's the MCU in the title after all).

Sure it's 32-bit and 300+ MHz but I don't think it runs SCB-level OSs like Linux. Didn't see any mention of an MMU.

Pardon me, but what is SCB? Googling didn't turn up anything relevant.

Likely a misspelling of SBC or single board computer.

Yes, sorry should have been SBC for single-board computer. Was outside, fingers cold. Happy new year!

I'd argue specs really do matter. There is several points to make:

Firstly hobbyists are really a spectrum. Anything in between an retired pro to a child playing with point resistor legs can be called hobbyists, and it is people from within this spectrum who make it accessible to others and advancing what is possible for someone without a lab and funding.

Having cheaply available hardware with at least good enough datasets drives this.

In my mind we shouldn't argue a blinking KARR is enough for a child. This is the argument for regression. We should think what a child's mind can come up with, if we make those recent things accessible to them.

Coming back to specs: CNXSoft is one of those sites that maps new features, technologies that we can use to hardware that becomes available. It is the inspiration to those higher level hobbyists to make the tools for the beginners.

Tbh I feel the opposite; hobbyists have ton of time to fiddle with weird underdocumented parts, while professionals are on the clock and need to have the parts work with their inhouse standard tools.

And the capabilities here are very alluring.

There's definitely a camp of casual tinkerers & makers relying on well paved cowpaths.

But imo yeah, I generally think hobbyists most interesting, best, & most notable character is willingness to fiddle. There's an equal sized camp of very good very advanced programmers who come here to dabble, but dabble hard, & they make & define the space.

These folks often coupled with an excitement & interest in advanced cool new systems. Which this certainly certainly is.

Specs matter, but differently, at least for me. I don't need the best performing chip out there, I just want an efficient chip. I love having a simple ESP chip that I can connect some wires to and flash ESPHome on. When I was a kid I only dreamed of such simplicity and efficiency. Especially with things such as Raspberry Pi's, which makes DIY computing really affordable too.

"Will it be supported within the arduino IDE?"

Well it's just a RISCV core which you can compile code with GCC, so I guess adding support to the Arduino IDE will be pretty easy. The wifi part is probably binary like other chips, but that did not prevent ESP8266/32 support in Arduino IDE.

Compiling code is the easy part, peripheral drivers which implement both the basic Arduino functions (digitalWrite and so on and so forth) and more advanced stuff like SPI/I2C, WiFi, etc. are necessary to make a working "Arduino ecosystem."

I think the reason that ESP was so successful is they provided both a working Arduino standard library so that sketches could just be copy-pasted from other platforms, and a reasonably decent real RTOS-backed development environment (ESP-IDF) for once users outgrew the Arduino training wheels.

> Why am I mentioning this? Look at arduino... relatively speaking it was a shitty chip, with low specs and not even that cheap...

But critically it had a reasonable quality, free, open source, C compiler.

If the raw tech exists, someone will make an Arduino-alike for it eventually. And it will be amazing, especially if it supports Thread.

Support for Thread too! I eonder how hard it would be to build an yggdrasil (or similar, like pinecone) network on top of thread.

I wish it had PIO similar to the Pi microcontroller though. These are game-changing for GPIO, I wonder if they are patented?

With this type of chip use the proper term, “support”.

PIO is supposedly patent pending.

Other CPUs have similar ideas, but none in the hobby space that I'm aware of. For example, Infineon Tricore has PCP (Peripheral Control Processor), which is more advanced but serves an identical role - offloading time-critical pin manipulation interrupt service from the CPU to a dedicated IO coprocessor.

I would have prefered a 64bits RISC-V cpu core, that, to share 64bits RISC-V (I know there is a good "compatibilty" between RISC-V 64bits ISA and 32bits ISA. "compatibilty"). My thought is: "Write 64bits RISC-V assembly once for all".

And it is missing that USB-C connector on the board and the memory card slot for booting code.

You'll tell me the pins are there, but then I am worried about the remaining count of usable GPIO pins.

If you want a 64bit RISC-V CPU then look at the Ox64 [1] from PINE64.

[1] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Ox64

Yep. Even if there is an extra 32bits risc-v cpu.

Isnt that the one they promised to open source but are shipping binary blobs instead?

I recall Pine64 asking for help REing one of their chips. I don't remember hearing Bouffalo would liberate anything themselves.

https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_iot_sdk/issues/1

Since there’s already good support for riskv in the Arduino IDE and micro python, this chip is going to be great if the price point and availability are on par with esp32-s3. The zigbee is actually a big deal for edge devices, and MCUs are all over the edge.

I hear it has an NPU as well, so that’s going to put it up there with the sipeed chip but with more of an MCU niche, which is pretty exciting for a lot of applications.

The big ? Is availability and price.

Less than $2 on a ready to use module.

Correction, it's Bouffalo.

They managed to spell it three times correctly. Unfortunately, one of the two mis-spellings is right in the title:-(

Hmm. I actually corrected the spellings two days ago, so I'm wondering why people are still seeing the old ones now. Caching must be involved, but accessing the website in a private windows shows the correct spellings to me.

I see now, there should be a redirected to a new URL, but it only works as a logged in user. I'll have to check that out... Next year.

I'll believe it when I see it. It'll likely be too expensive or permanently out of stock...

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