Lately I’ve been really liking the idea of having something hosted on a RISC-V machine. RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is a competitor to ARM. The idea of having a something running on an open source operating system, running on an open standard CPU, served from my house, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
I was under the impression that most Linux distributions were unstable on RISC-V. Turns out, I’m wrong about that. From a quick search, the following have official Debian images:
and the Pine64 Star64 has a community-maintained Armbian image.
Does anyone here have a RISC-V single-board computer doing anything practical for you?
Currently, waiting for the Milk-V Oasis. Looking forward to a fully-compliant implementation in the SG2380. Should make for better mainline support.
That looks so cool. I was completely unaware that there were desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs. I thought they were all still SBCs.
It’s set for release in H2 of this year. This should be an actual desktop-class processor, performance-wise. Mini-ITX form factor too! The RISC-V processors are going through generations blazingly fast. Probably partly because we hobbyists get to do some QA.
I would caution though that this is still likely in the territory of “dev board”. Probably not going to be mainstream-ready and will have plenty of quirks. But, it’s a really big step forward.
I’m thinking it might be my 2.5G router when it drops. Or worst case, maybe retire the Atom I’m using for a NAS.
I’ve been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn’t suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.
A homemade RISC-V fightstick? This is combining all of my favorite things! I bought a leverless controller recently (an SGF Bridget).
I’m only vaguely familiar with microcontrollers, but I know there are libraries out there for using an Arduino to make a mechanical keyboard or fightstick. Is there something similar for the CH32V305?
I’m intending to use an Oasis for a NAS and virtualization host. If it plays nice, maybe put together a cluster.
Right there with you. I didn’t have a console as a kid so, I’m pretty bad at fighting games. Have been holding back a bit in the MCUs as well but, mainly due to time constraints and waiting for my new hobby dev system to arrive. But, have a good number of plans for MCUs and other things - hopefully the SG2380 gets a bare chip release, like the SG2000/2002 because I want to try making a motherboard/SOM to move towards a fully FOSHW computer (pretty sure that the SG2380 isn’t going to be OSHW initially but, being fully-compliant should be a good place to start).