Getting started with the BL618 and the BL618 development board

Saturday, January 14, 2023

Bouffalo has recently released their new chips : the BL616 and BL618 RISC-V MCU. Equipped with a WiFi6 + Bluetooth5 + Zigbee radio, this 32bit RISC-V single core chip runs at up to 320Mhz and is supported by 532KB of SRAM memory. Different variants of the chips exist with integrated flash and pSRAM memory. It also supports external flash and pSRAM memory. I was lucky enough to receive one of the first BL61X_MB development board.…

How to debug the Bouffalo BL60x MCU using JTAG, OpenOCD and GDB

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

BL602/604 is a RISC-V MCU by Bouffalolab. It’s integrated in the PineCone devboard by Pine64 , as well as in the PineDio STACK . This is a relatively new chip : developer tools are not mature yet and the documentation is often a bit lacking. This makes the developer experience not as comfortable is it should be. In this article, I’ll detail how to wire the PineCone to a JTAG adapter (the Pine64 USB JTAG adapter ), and how to setup OpenOCD and GDB to debug the code running on it.…

My DIY low-power 6 SSD NAS based on the Quartz64 ARM board

Sunday, May 29, 2022

Introduction ARM SBCs have been around for a few years now. They were made popular and accessible mostly by the RaspberryPi released in 2012 . I’ve been enjoying building countless projects around these boards : web servers, home-automation, camera recording, IM bots,… A new trend has recently appeared in the SBC world : the PCIe slot! The RaspberryPi 4 Compute Module exposes it via the IO board , and the Pine64 RockPro64 is equipped with a PCIe 4x open-ended slot directly on the board.…

First look at the 2nd prototype version of the PineDio STACK

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

PineDio is a new product range at Pine64 based on LoRa. Those products include a LoRa gateway, a USB-LoRa adapter, a LoRa backplate for the PinePhone and an embedded development kit based on the RISC-V BL604 MCU. You’ll find more info about PineDio on the wiki . Those products are not yet available for sale, as we are still working on bringing them up and running by writing software and drivers for them.…

How to replace the keyboard of your PineBookPro

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Recently, the keyboard of my PineBookPro started to type keys by itself. It was very annoying up to the point it was impossible to type the password to unlock my session. I decided it was time to replace the keyboard. Fortunately, the wiki provides a very detailed replacement procedure . I followed it to the letter and everything went well. I took a few pictures during the operation and have already added them to the wiki page as well.…

A driver for the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone

Thursday, November 25, 2021

In previous articles, I introduced the LoRa blackplate for the Pinephone and I flashed the onboard MCU with an SPI<->I²C bridge firmware . In this post, I’ll write a driver that allows the Pinephone to send ant receive LoRa messages via this LoRa backplate! How to communicate with the SX1262 ? The SX1262 (LoRa radio) is an SPI chip. As the pogo pins only expose and I²C bus, the Pinephone cannot communicate directly with the radio.…

Flashing the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

In the previous article about the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone , I introduced the devices and tried to understand how it was supposed to work (I received the devices with no instructions at all). I made a few assumptions regarding the pinout of the pogo pads and of the wires that were soldered on one of the board by looking at the PCB, at the schematics and at the source code of the bridge (I²C <-> SPI) firmware that is linked on the wiki :…

First look at the LoRa backplate for the Pinephone

Sunday, November 14, 2021

The LoRa backplate for the Pinephone A few months ago, Pine64 sent me a few prototypes of their new devices from the PineDio range. PineDio is the name of LoRa based devices : The PineDio STACK : a development board based on the BL604 RISC-V MCU, equipped with the SX1262 LoRa module The PineDio Gateway : a LoRa gateway based on the Pine A64 SBC and the RAK2287 LoRa concentrator The PineDio USB adapter : a USB adapter to the Sx1262 LoRa module The PineDio LoRa backplate for the Pinephone I’ve already shared some information about the gateway on this blog and about the USB adapter on the Pine64 wiki .…

Let's plug an additional NIC on the Quartz64 !

Saturday, October 30, 2021

The Quartz64 and its PCIe port The Quartz64 is the latest SBC from Pine64 . It’s based on the RK3566 CPU running @2Ghz with up to 8GB of RAM (mine has 8GB) and provides a PCIe 4x port! This PCIe port is actually what I find amazing about this board. I know that the RockPro64 also provides this port but I haven’t had the opportunity to get my hands on this one board.…

Running a selfhosted Github runner on a PinePhone

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

The PinePhone The PinePhone from Pine64 is a Linux mobile phone running mainstream kernel and open source software. It’s supported by many Linux distributions like Manjaro, UbuntuTouch, SailfishOS, PostmarketOS, Mobian many many more . It provides nice features like privacy switches and is extensible thanks to pogo pins on the back of the phone. But the PinePhone is not a simple mobile phone : it’s a full-blown AARCH64 computer running on Linux!…