The Raspberry Pi Pico W has a brand new competitor within the type of Pine64’s upcoming Ox64, noticed by CNX Software program (opens in new tab), which makes use of the more and more common RISC-V structure to pack quite a lot of computing energy right into a tiny house. A lot, in reality, that it is beginning to blur the boundaries between microcontrollers and SBCs.
There’s been no official announcement, the corporate hasn’t tweeted or blogged about it, and there isn’t any technique to truly purchase the board but, however we do know loads about it because of a put up on the Pine64 Wiki. There is a dual-core Bouffalo Lab BL808 RISC-V (opens in new tab) SoC on the coronary heart of it, however the cores are mismatched: one is an Alibaba T-head C906 64-bit core working at 480MHz, whereas the opposite is an Alibaba T-head E907 32-bit core at 230MHz. There is a huge, for a microcontroller, 64MB of RAM, an AI engine (Bouffalo’s BLAI-100), Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 5, plus IEEE 802.15.4, higher often known as Zigbee. There’s as much as 128Mbit of flash storage too, plus a micro SD card slot, and should you match it right into a provider board with an Ethernet port, it could use that too.
Knowledge and energy are catered for by a Sort-C USB 2 OTG port, whereas the micro SD slot can even settle for energy. The USB additionally carries a two-lane MIPI CSI interface for a digital camera connection. Unfold across the edges of the board are 26 GPIO holes, which assist protocols reminiscent of SPI, I2C and UART. There’s an on-board MJPEG and h.264 encoder that may handle as much as 1920×1080 at 30fps.
The Ox64 is strictly the identical measurement as a Raspberry Pi (opens in new tab) Pico, at a breadboard-friendly 51mm x 21mm (2in x 0.8in) and appears prone to run a Linux-based OS, although no photos are at present accessible other than these for Alpha testing. The board isn’t but a closing product, and never at present on the market, however is prone to be lower than $10.
Ox64 | Raspberry Pi Pico | |
Dimension | 21 mm x 51 mm | 21 mm x 51 mm |
Processor | Twin-core Alibaba T-head C906, 480MHz and 230MHz | Twin-core Arm Cortex-M0+, 133MHz |
RAM | 64Mb | 264Kb |
Storage | As much as 128Mb | 2Mb |
Networking | Wi-Fi 4, Bluetooth 5, Zigbee | Wi-Fi 4 (W and WH variants solely) |
USB | 2.0 | 1.1 |
GPIO pins | 26 | 26 |
Further interfaces | SPI, I2C, UART, MIPI CSI | SPI, i2C, UART, PWM |