First experience with the domestic RISC-V development board RV-STAR

小白two

First experience with the domestic RISC-V development board RV-STAR [Copy link]

 

First experience with RV-STAR development board

I saw on the official account of Corelai Technology that they released a RISC-V development board, so I quickly bought one. Although the epidemic in Wuhan is very serious now, I still received the express package very quickly. I was excited to see what this board is like.

Let’s take a close-up of the front first. The emerald green board has two chips on board, which is rare. The entire board is covered with various peripheral interfaces, giving it a very technological feel.

The official document says that it uses a TYPEC power supply port, which can also be used to download programs. This is quite convenient, and my Xiaomi mobile phone cable can be put into use directly.

The core chip of the board is the GD32VF103VBT6 core. Here is a close-up of it. It is indeed a GD32 chip.

These two small buttons look very textured and attracted my attention, but I don’t know what they are used for. I will study them more carefully later.

Although the board is small, it has all the necessary functions. You can also find relevant information about the board on the community website of Rvmcu (www.rvmcu.com).

• Microcontroller: GD32VF103VBT6 (32-bit RISC-V processor)

  • Core: Bumblebee core of CoreLite Technology (RV32IMAC)

  • Main frequency: 108MHz

  • Memory: built-in 128KB Flash, 32KB SRAM

  • Working voltage: 2.6~3.6V

  • Peripheral resources: Timer (advanced 16-bit timer* 1, general 16-bit timer* 4), U(S)ART* 5, I2C* 2, SPI* 3, CAN* 2, USBFS* 1, ADC* 2 (16 external channels), DAC* 2, EXMC* 1

• Peripherals and interfaces:

  • USB Type-C interface: download, debug, serial communication functions

  • Micro USB interface: USB-OTG function

  • microSD card slot (not soldered by default): external SD card storage (SPI interface)

  • JTAG interface: can separate the MCU and debugger so that they can work separately

  • PMOD interface*2: SPI, I2C

  • Double-row standard 2.54mm female header interface: Arduino compatible interface (outer side), EXMC expansion interface (inner side)

  • User button* 2: Reset, wake up

  • RGB LED* 1

There are still a lot of peripheral resources and interfaces. Overall, this board far exceeds expectations.

Practical operation - Pan it

Below I will share how I light up the LED according to the SDK and tool chain provided. Before receiving the board, I read the official documentation. The official provides an IDE quick start, which is worth reading for novices, and can help you quickly start building a local environment. More examples provide some examples and related codes, which are very convenient for demo debugging.

Here is my quick start guide.

Download SEGGER Embedded Studio and JLink

Download toolchain and openocd

Connect the board to the PC and install the driver

Download SEGGER Embedded Studio and JLink

The IDE platform provided by Xinlai is SEGGER Embedded Studio, and the IDE software can be downloaded from the SEGGER official website. It should be noted that to download the IDE that supports RISC-V, I downloaded the wrong one at first, and it took me a long time to adjust it. In the end, I had to ask Xinlai's R&D to figure it out.

After installing SEGGER Embedded Studio, you also need to install the JLink driver, which can also be downloaded from the SEGGER official website.

Download toolchain and openocd

After downloading and installing, you need to prepare the toolchain and openocd, which can be downloaded from the official website of Nucleisys. The page link is as follows: https://www.nucleisys.com/download.php. Download the corresponding RISC-V GNU Toolchain and OpenOCD according to the system used.

Download and decompress, then create a Nuclei_Toolchain folder in the previous SEGGER Embedded Studio installation path, put the toolchain and openocd in it, note that the file names are gcc and openocd respectively, and the next level file is required to be the bin file layer.

Connect the board to the PC and install the driver

RV-STAR has an onboard debugger, so just short-circuit and connect directly to the Type-C. Now it's time for my Xiaomi phone power cord to come into play.

You can find the driver software on the Nucleisys official website and double-click to install it. The link is as follows: https://www.nucleisys.com/developboard.php

Download the DEMO project

Download the demo project of RV-STAR from github. The link is as follows: https://github.com/riscv-mcu/ses_nuclei_sdk_projects. This is a bit slow. I really want to complain about github. It is getting slower and slower. It took some time to download this package.

After downloading, double-click to open the rvstardemos folder, and double-click rvstardemos.emProject to open the IDE.

Select the running_led project and press F5 to enter the debugging mode.

Click Run, and you will see the LED switch between red, green, blue and white. If you have a serial debugging assistant, you can also see the output in the serial debugging assistant. Embedded Studio also comes with a serial debugging assistant.

At this point, my first demo has been run, and it feels very easy to use. The main reason is that Core has prepared the entire editing and debugging tool chain, and you just need to follow the instructions. But you still need to study what specific applications this board can be used for. There are quite a lot of official examples, so I will study them slowly when I have time.

damiaa

OK. I will play with the whole RISC-V board when I have time.