Sipeed M1S

The Story so far

The first RISC-V linux boards at a reasonable price (below $100) started to become available in June 2021.  They were based on the T-Head C906 RISC-V 64 bit core, incorporated into an Allwinner D1 SoC.  T-Head is Alibaba's RISC-V subsiduary and I believe Alibaba have open-sourced the core to encourage community development.  I have been very fortunate to be able to try out these boards early on in their life cycle as they are made available.

Allwinner Nezha    - signed up to IndieGoGo crowdfunding 21st May 2021, received 22nd June

Sipeed Lichee RV   -  ordered from AliExpress 24 November 2021 and delivered 16th December

MangoPi MQ-Pro    - Ordered 19th July 2021 delivered 10th August.

Crowdfunding

Following on from the Allwinner D1, Bouffalo Labs have released the BL808 Soc, also based on the C906 core, incorporating some other smaller processors.  
Sipeed announced an IndieGogo crowdfunder for the M1S dock which I signed up for on 9th November 2022 and my chips arrived on 22nd December 2022.
The campaign seems to be organised by Wu Caesar who is one of the stalwarts of the Mainline Linux RISC-V telegram forum.

Hardware

The BL808 SoC is a bit unusual in that it has 3 CPUs on board, the fastest based on C906 RISC64 core is capable of running linux. The second core is an E907 and is used for auxiliary functions such as camera image processing.

It also has logic for AI and Image Processing.

Communication is provided with wifi and bluetooth connectivity and there are both UART and OTG USB serial connectors.

One of many intruiging functions is an inbuilt FFT accelerator.

The M1S configuration I purchased comes with a camera and SPI LCD screen, all for $15-$20.

The hardware is capable of running Linux and FreeRTOS is also available.

First Look

There are many exciting features of the M1S to investigate.  Of course I need to get Linux running and check it out but before I do that (and I will post later on any successes) I had a look to check out the Sipeed documentation.  Although the board only started shipping in December 2022 there is some excellent documentation and demo programs.

When I powered up the board, the first thing I saw was me!  The demo program repeatedly retrieves images from the onboard camera and displays them on the LCD screen.  Connecting the UART and OTG USB-C connectors to the PC, I could start Putty sessions on both.  The C906 connected port showed some sort of monitor command prompt and the E907 connection showed output messages from the camera screen processing.

The sipeed wiki provides an excellent getting started guide which I could follow to try out some demo programs.  It has an amazingly good facility to load programs.  Firstly you press the two side buttons and RST to put the system into u-burn mode.  This causes the OTG to display a small 5MB drive visible on the PC.  You then copy a program to the drive and, as soon as the copy is finished the demo starts up.  This is amazing to use, within 5s you can try a different program.

In addition to the initial camera demo my favourite is a small python interface which you can use to enter python programs which control the screen (or anything else you want to do).

In summary this is a great board, with lots of interesting features, and promising documentation which I am looking forward to iinvestigating further.