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?
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?
This is the firmware I’ve been working on. Basically I wrote it because at the time (early 2023) there wasn’t a “good” keyboard firmware like QMK or ZMK for the CH32V305. Now it supports keyboards, joysticks, and a rudimentary pointing device made out of a PS2-style analogue stick.
https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch32v-keyboard/-/tree/fightstick?ref_type=heads
That branch has the mapping I used. Note this firmware has a keyboard-centric assumption that switches are wired as a matrix (between two sense lines), even if that matrix is 1x24, rather than just grounding a sense line individually.
The stick portion was one of those “Pandora Box” devices that was built into a cabinet and pre-wired to a crappy Android TV box.
I bought it because I figured it was probably cheaper than cutting a decent looking cabinet and buying the buttons off AliExpress. That also meant it came with a predefined cable harness to fit the Android box. In the hopes of making it tidy, and reversible, I ordered a little throwaway PCB that accepted the existing 40-pin plug and bridged it to a nanoCH32V305 breakout board. Of course, I made a design mistake, so the PCB had bodge wires, so not much was saved.
If you’re starting from scratch, you could direct-wire to the MCU breakout board.
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).