Bluetrum, a company known for its high-performance Bluetooth speakers and headsets, had announced to work on open source and popular RISC-V core. So, this Chinese chip manufacturer has been working on an AB5301A Bluetooth RISC-V MCU based development board. The AB32VG1 an audio player microcontroller has an Arduino UNO form factor, designed for general purposes and audio applications.
The board comes in a pack with a USB port and MicroSD card making interfacing possible. Also, the header compatible with Arduino UNO makes prototyping easier. Besides, the 3.5mm audio jack adds up to the peripherals and is of great use for different applications.
Features of AB32VG1
The AB32VG1 development board has a CPU based on a 32-bit RISC-V core. The core relies on IP based on the RISC-V instruction set created by Bluetrum. The Bluetrum AB5301A RISC-V MCU can be clocked up to 120 MHz and is overclockable up to 192 MHz.
Further, the board has 192KB RAM and flash memory of 1MB flash with a TF card slot which is in use for extra storage purposes. The slot available for MicroSD cards can also be in usage for storing data. The AB32VG1 development board communicates wirelessly through Bluetooth 5.0 and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). The PCB antenna present onboard is designed for FM radio applications.
Also, this 9 cm x 6 cm sized board can be powered using 5V via USB Type-C or Vin pin on the expansion header. Moreover, the board has 13 expansion headers namely one 12C, six ADCs and six PWM. The other onboard peripherals include an IR receiver, three user buttons, one reset button, RGB LED, power LED, status LEDs, and various configuration jumpers. There are various GPIO headers that make interfacing with other devices possible.
RT Thread and AB32VG1 Development Board
RT Thread is an open-source embedded real-time operating system that is in utilization for IoT applications. Bluetrum’s AB32VG1 development board utilizes this operating system and can be programmed using the RT-Thread Studio IDE. Moreover, the RT-Thread has two versions, which are the standard version and the nano version.
“The standard version consists of a kernel layer, components and service layer, and IoT framework layer, while the Nano version has a very small footprint and refined hard real-time kernel, better suited to resource-constrained microcontroller units (MCU).” The tutorials for RT Thread are available in Chinese for developers.
One can purchase Bluetrum’s AB32VG1, which is no doubt a great competition for ARM-based development boards from Taobao. It costs around 79.90 Yuan. For more details visit the Gitee page. However, not much information is available on this product. The source for all technical details and pictures is the official product site.
Sanskriti Sawant is a student of Electronics and Telecommunication engineering. She is passionate about Computer architecture, VLSI and plans to major in them. She is working on HDL languages and FPGA’s.
