In the last decade, RISC-V has seen an exponentially increased adoption from manufacturing, designing a wide range of boards under its ecosystem, offering high performance. A Chinese open-source community working on the real-time operating system (RTOS) has designed a RISC-V-based development kit, MangoPi Nezha MQ featuring popular Allwinner D1s (commonly seen as F133 on the hardware) system-on-chip.
Last year, we saw the Allwinner D1 development board, but due to its increasing SoC cost, the manufacturer had to release a cheaper onboard chip which was later introduced as Allwinner D1s. The new system-on-chip comes with Alibaba/T-Head Xuantie C906 RISC-V core clocked at a frequency of 1GHz with integrated 64MB DDR2 memory.
Specifications of MangoPi-Nezha MQ Developer Kit
- SoC: Allwinner D1s with C906 RISC-V processor core @1GHz
- Memory: 64MB DDR2
- Wireless connectivity: RTL8189-based Wi-Fi
- USB Connectivity: USB Type-C support for USB-OTG and USB-HOST
- Expansion: 2x 22-pin expansion headers
- Storage: MicroSD card slot and solder points for NAND/NOR flash
- Display: 15-pin Raspberry Pi DSI FPC, 40-pin RGB FPC, 6-pin capacitive touch FPC
- Audio: Onboard microphone
- Camera: 24-pin DVP interface
- Buttons: BOOT and Reset buttons
- Power supply: 5V via USB Type-C
- Dimensions: 4×4 cm
When it comes to software support, the MangoPi-Nezha MQ development board runs Tina Linuz, an OpenWrt-based embedded system. To take advantage of the hardware functionalities, the board is combined with the LVGL open-source graphics library. For real-time applications, the manufacturer has also supported xboot and RT-Smart. As a high-performance microkernel operating system fills the gap between traditional real-time operating systems (RTOSs) and Linux., RT-Smart You can consider purchasing the hardware if you are new to the RISC-V hardware ecosystem.
Being an open-source project, schematics and PCB layout files are available on the official GitHub repository. As developers look for community support, the product will soon be available for crowdfunding on CrowdSupply. If you are interested in supporting the mission, consider signing up on the pre-launch product page.