BeagleV is the world's first affordable RISC-V Linux development board. Although there are other RISC-V development boards capable of running Linux on the market, BeagleV significantly cuts the price. It will be available at about 149USD. This makes it an excellent choice for research and development purposes.
Unlike ARM or x86, the RISC-V computer architecture is provided under open source licenses that do not require any fees to use. This groundbreaking new business model has the potential to disturb the chip manufacturing industry and the market as we know it today.
As a software engineer working on various open source projects, I applied and I was approved in the Beagleboard community Beta program therefore I have early access to this BeagleV board. I received for free. Now let's have a closer look at it in my YouTube video.
BeagleV is with a RISC-V 64-bit CPU at 1.0GHz from StarFive. The beta version is with JH7100 chipset. The final version will be with newer JH7110 chipset. There are RAM chips on both sides of the CPU. There are variants of the board with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 RAM. In corner below the 40 pin header, there is a chip for 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2. There are also dedicated connectors for a display and for a couple of cameras.
On the front side of BeagleV you will find USB-C connector for powering the board, HDMI connector and a couple of button to boot and reset. As of the moment the software driver is not compatible with all HDMI displays. Some of the old model displays cannot work with BeagleV HDMI port. I hope this will be fixed in near future.
On the other side there are a Gigabit Ethernet port and 4 USB 3.0 Host Type-A ports. There is also a 3.5mm audio jack. In the corner there are JTAG pins for advanced hardware debugging.
The 40 pin header is the same as the header on modern Raspberry Pi models. However, all GPIOs can be configured to different functions including but not limited to SDIO, Audio, SPI, I2C, UART and PWM. There are also a dedicated display port and a microSD card slot on the back of BeagleV.
