Another RISC-V development system is now available. This time, it has an Allwinner D1s processor in a package designed to teach programming. Higashiyama PI-D1 is CNX software (opens in new tab)is sold with a carrier board installed AliExpress (opens in new tab) For under $20.
Compared to something like the Raspberry Pi 4 (opens in new tab), Dongshan PI-D1s, designed at 100ask, are a bit lighter in the spec department, but much smaller and cheaper. It has 64MB of DDR2 RAM. There’s also 16MB of flash storage, which is said to be powerful enough to encode and decode 1080p video at 60fps (although encoding seems limited to Motion JPEG).
The middle board itself, the red bit in the image above, is plugged into the carrier board. No image for core module without carrier. So you can solder them together. The carrier adds a Micro SD card slot and a USB Type-C pair. Both can obviously be used to power devices, but they serve different functions when not connected to Juice. One as OTG port and one for UART and CKLink debug.
It also has three rows of pins, all with 40 thin metal spines, but with slightly different uses. One supports display and audio interfaces, one is GPIO, USB, I2C, SPI, and TV input/output, and the third is GPIO, UART, and I2C. The latter pair also corresponds to the Raspberry Pi’s power signal. No mention is made of networking capabilities.
With an on-board RISC-V debugger, the board appears to be aimed at users interested in low-level programming of open-source processor architectures. data sheet (opens in new tab) Available from 100ask. Software support is limited to the Tina Linux SDK, crowdsourcing (opens in new tab) There is an ongoing campaign to provide better software support and documentation, but it appears to be Chinese only at the moment.
