Sipeed LicheeRV Dock

 A couple of weeks after I saw the Sipeed LicheeRV advertised and bought one, the LicheeRV Dock became available.  A docking station for the LicheeRV costs about £4.  I ordered a LicheeRV + Dock on 29th December and it was delivered 13th January.  The docking station provides a HDMI connection, a USB port, 40 pin connector and wifi (Realtek 8723DS), so there are many more things you can do with it.

 

Its specification is very similar to the Nezha which came out 6 months ago but it is about 1/3 the price.  This was expected, the Nezha gave people an early look at RISC-V.  The LicheeRV is more of a product.

Documentation for the LicheeRV is now available on the sipeed BBS and it is quite extensive.  Although it is initially in Chinese,  Google Translate does a perfectly acceptable job translating it into English for me.

There are also a number of images available to make installation easier.  Firstly I tried the Debian image and, once I had plugged a screen in on the HDMI port and a keyboard/mouse on the USB port I was ready to go.

It was easy to boot into Debian and use the GUI.  Once I worked out the wifi is RTL8723DS and chosen the right image I could configure the wifi and SSH into the system easily enough.

Similarly Tina is easy to setup.  I downloaded and burned the image for tina hdmi 8723 and booted up.  I was then able to configure wifi details and connect to the network.

The screen is used as a monitor rather than a terminal I think.  When booting it show a 480x480 screen shot in chinese with a date 2021.12.8.  I can display a color bar test but the frame viewer doesn't work for me (yet?).

So for about £20 I have a working RV system with network, HDMI and a choice of Operating Systems.