Arduino Cinque!

That’s fantastic news. Congratulations to all!

Having an “Arduino compatible” board is one thing, but an official RISC-V board from arduino.org is another level of cred altogether.

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When I got my HiFive1 the first thing I did was work out the UART so that I could use this neat shield. Having it essentially built-in is a lovely touch. Thanks, SiFive!

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Hopefully an official Arduino board will have wide distribution in the usual walk-in retail stores that have Arduinos and Pis.

The announcement is a bit light on details. Such as price.

It sounds as if it’s the exact same SoC, so the MHz, SRAM, and cache will be the same. But the flash could be different.

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The weird thing is that the ESP32 “WIFI/BT” chip itself has:

  • 240 MHz dual core Tensilica CPU, 600 DMIPS
  • 520 KB SRAM
  • 16 MB flash
  • 32 GPIO all PWM capable, 3x UART, 3x SPI, 2x I2C, 2x I2S, 12x ADC, 2x DAC, 50 MHz SDIO, OpenOCD debug

So the FE310 isn’t even the most powerful CPU on the board.

The ESP32 doesn’t have USB, so I guess the FTDI is still needed.

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Neat indeed! I just had to buy one.:smiley:

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They’re teasing us a bit by only showing the back of a PCB panel.

Heh, true. To be fair, you don’t buy an Arduino for power or efficiency.

We’ve seen the front now and there’s an STM32F103RBT6 on there too! That’s a 72 MHz Cortex M3 that goes for about $3 in quantity 1000.

So that’s at least three different ISAs on the board :slight_smile:

( I think that ARM has USB, so I’m assuming the FTDI is gone)

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Good. FTDI chips are powered by spite.

Clearer picture on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arduino/status/865981432740446208

No voltage buffer and selection jumper.
Can’t find the exact memory part number but 25Q32 may imply a 32MBit flash memory? Both BOM cost saving measures so the ESP can be added?

FE310 has its own small-pitch header separate from the Arduino’s ICSP. Intended for factory programming?

“The 68 x 51mm board features 128Mbit off-chip SPI flash, 19x digital I/O pins, 9x PWM pins, an SPI controller, and 3x hardware CS pins.”

No word about analogue input pins, which is a shame as both the ESP32 and ARM on the board have some.

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N.B., that paragraph is in reference to the HiFive1. Flash size may still be different on the Cinque?

Ah, rats. I didn’t think I read it so fast to have missed that. Maybe. Or maybe they updated it.

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Exciting times indeed!!

All I can say right now is we’re still working with the Arduino team on the details of the final stuffing options [You can tell from the picture it’s not fully populated… :slight_smile: ]

HiFive1 will continue to be available but ultimately the goal is to maximize the distribution of RISC-V and open-source silicon everywhere, and to make it accessible to as many people as possible, which is why the Arduino Cinque is such exciting news for us!

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Any plans to sell individual chips @jackckang? I’d love to make an Adafruit Feather form factor board.

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Check out this thread for some info regarding plans to sell indifuvual chiips.You might be able to get some samples.

Thanks @dagema! I didn’t see it due to the ambiguous title.