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Mar 15, 2022·edited Mar 23, 2022Liked by Bryan Lunduke

I, umm, impulse bought this. The ARM ones had little appeal to me other than the form factor as I have several ARM computers already. But, a reasonably priced RISC-V machine and a cool form factor? Yes please. Without a GPU it will be a text based machine, similar to the TRS-80 from which it draws inspiration, but it should be more than sufficient for SSH and telnet.

EDIT: This chip is beefier than I thought it would be. I had multiple comments on this, and finally found the datasheet from Allwinner and what follows is what I found.

**Allwinner D1 SOC facts in brief:**

* XuanTie C906 RISC-V CPU and HiFi4 DSP

* DDR2/DDR3 SDRAM

* SD3.0/SDIO3.0/eMMC5.0

* H.265/H.264/MPEG-1/2/4/JPEG/VC1 decoding, up to 4K

* JPEG/MJPEG encoding, up to 1080p@60fps

* Allwinner SmartColor2.0 post processing

* Supports de-interlace (DI) up to 1080p@60fps

* Supports Graphic 2D (G2D) hardware accelerator including rotate, mixer, LBC decompression functions

* RGB interface up to 1920 x 1080@60fps

* Dual link LVDS interface up to 1920 x 1080@60fps 4-lane MIPI DSI up to 1920 x 1200@60fps

* HDMI TX interface up to 4K@30fps

* CVBS OUT interface, supporting NTSC and PAL format

* 8-bit parallel CSI interface

* CVBS IN interface, supporting NTSC and PAL format

* 2 DACs and 3 ADCs

* LINEOUTLP/N, LINEOUTRP/N, HPOUTL/R, MICIN1P/1N, MICIN2P/2N, MICIN3P/3N, LINEINL/R, FMINL/R

* Three I2S/PCM external interfaces (I2S0, I2S1, I2S2)

* Maximum 8 digital PDM microphones (DMIC)

* OWA TX and OWA RX, compliance with S/PDIF interface

* AES, DES, 3DES, RSA, MD5, SHA, HMAC

* Integrated 2 Kbits OTP storage space

* USB 2.0 DRD (USB0) and USB 2.0 HOST (USB1)

* 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet port with RGMII and RMII interfaces

* Up to 6 UART controllers (UART0, UART1, UART2, UART3, UART4, UART5)

* Up to 2 SPI controllers (SPI0, SPI1)

* Up to 4 TWI controllers (TWI0, TWI1, TWI2, TWI3)

* CIR RX and CIR TX

* 8 independent PWM channels (PWM0 to PWM7)

* 2-ch GPADC

* 4-ch TPADC

* 1-ch LRADC

* LEDC

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Still waiting for mine :( I hope they manage to get these out.

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$100 cheaper then the A06 model I have on order.

Would you recommend going with the RISC-V model instead? (Might be more fun.)

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