Sipeed LicheeRV Panel

Intro

The Sipeed LicheeRV 86 Panel is a very exciting product.  It is based on the same LicheeRV D1 board and dock but it includes a 4" touch screen and ethernet connection.  At $72 it is somewhat more expensive than the basic boards but it is much closer to being a self-contained working system.  It works on 5V USB or 12V supply.  The panel comes with a case which protects the board which is attached to its rear side.  In fact it could easily provide the basis for a home automation control.  It is only about the size of a light switch and could easily be wall mounted near a door way to activate room functions.  The only extra needed is a 12V power supply (similar to the one used by low voltage LEDs).

There is plenty of documentation available on the Sipeed BBS and the linux-sunxi community web-site has started to add descriptions.

Installation - Tina

I first installed the Tina WAFT (WebAssembly Framework for Things) image using good instructions which Sipeed provided, translated to English with Google Translate.  A USB cable connected to the USB-C UART port at one end and the PC at the other to provide power and a serial console.  The system boots in about 5 seconds into Maix Linux.  Tina / MaixLinux is a very small IoT (Internet of Things) linux which uses Busybox to provide basic command line tools. The image is only 115MB in size so it is great for small systems. I quickly tried looking at using WAFT but the demo didn't seem to work.  In addition, the panel screen didn't work initially (rapid scrolling of the image) so I moved on Debian.

Installation - Debian

The debain image is somewhat larger.  Initially I chose LicheeRV_Debian_86_480p.7z. It was easy enough to download from mega.nz although it was 1.1G compressed and expands into a 4GB image.

As usual I used PhoenixCard software to burn the image and inserted in the SD card on the back of the panel.  The system boots up without many errors and you can sign on via the serial console (putty) as sipeed or root.

The Panel has an ethernet connection using a rather unusual connector onto the back of the panel which is shown below.  The cable provided has an RJ45 and a barrel connector on one end and circuit board connectors for ethernet (on the left) and power (on the right).  If you want you can use the 12V power connector instead of using USB power input.  With the ethernet connected we can easily signin to the system using ssdh

When the system was booted up the 4 inch screen showed a signon screen scrolling vertically and was unuseable.  I tried all the different images, both Tina and Debian but the screen problem remained.  Eventually I tried over-writing the "fex" partition on the SD card (partition 1) with the fex file for a 720p display.  On booting the system works perfectly.  So the problem was that the downloaded images were for a 480p screen, which is the one which is described in the advert.  However I have a 720p screen which needs a different fex file.  I reported this on the LicheeRV/Nezha Telegram thread and a note will be added to the linux-sunxi community webpage to explain this.

I plugged a screen and keyboard into the HOST USB port and I was then able to signin to Debian.  The screen is 720p x 720p so although it is very small it is very detailed and if you look closely enough it is quite useable.  As a first test I ran HTOP to display system usage.
I wanted to display an image and there weren't any I could find on the system.  I needed to install wget using the apt package manager and could then download an image from my website and display it on the panel.  It looks very clear.

Initially I couldn't get the wireless interface to work on either Debian or Tina.  Once I realised that I am using the 8723ds wireless chip (not the xr829) I retrieved the correct images and wifi networking works fine.

I now have available a lovely RISC-V panel with ethernet / wifi with a small high quality screen.