Sipeed LicheeRV

 Back in June 2021, I was fortunate enough to spot that the Sipeed Nezha RISC-V development SBC was on sale.  It is the first Linux RISC-V SBC system for less than $100 and marks the beginning of a new era in home / hobbyist computers.  It is based on the Raspberry Pi form factor and runs Debian Linux.  I have greatly enjoyed getting to know it and particularly using it to write some simple RISC-V assembly programs which I can compile directly using the GCC compiler.

On 24th November I saw on the Sipeed twitter feed that the Lichee RV is for sale.  It uses the same processor as the Nezha but has very few peripherals on board and no GPIO pins.  An SPI connector is used for an LCD screen and there is an SD card holder.  Instead it has an m2 connector which can connect to external devices such as Ethernet, wifi, bluetooth.  It costs $13 as opposed to the Nezha $99 crowdfunder price and doesn't have a limit on the number available.

 I purchased the version with a screen (total $17) on Ali Express and waited in anticipation for it to be delivered.  It arrived in the UK on 4th December and was delivered 16th December so I was one of the first to receive them outside China, certainly an early arrival in Europe.

Initially I wasn't sure what to do with it, my Nezha SD card didn't seem to do anything.  On 24th December O-GL in France and Daniel Maslowski in Germany on Telegram provided me with the information needed.  There is an international download folder on mega.nz and a  set of tutorials on the sipeed forum.

On 4th January I was  lucky enough to look a the Mega.nz site and see that a zip file for an Ubuntu 20.04 build including the LCD had just been uploaded.  It was slightly more complicated to download than the usual images, I had to locate files manually in the correct part of the SD card.  However this meant that the download was 167MB instead of 1.07GB so it was worth the extra work.  Initially the build did nothing but on 5th January someone on Telegram posted a correction to the instructions and the result was that I could get a working Ubuntu Linux with tiny LCD console.

Of course there wasn't a lot I could do with just a screen but I was quickly able to solder on the four pins in the bottom left corner of the board so that I could connect an FTDI cable, allowing me to sign on to a serial console session.

So I now have a working Linux system on a tiny 6cm x 4cm board - a bit similar to the RPi Zero.

I was also able to download Debian and Tina images and create SD cards.  The Sipeed tutorial provides console commands to switch the on board LED on/off using GPIO commands and Iwas able to check that this works.  The basic board doesn't have any networking capability so I had to await my LicheeRV dock before progressing much further.