HiFive Inventor Board - Schematics?

HiFive1 Rev B
1

Hello,

Is there any schematics available for the (BBC Doctor Who) HiFive Inventor Board? I guess that it is the same as the SiFive Inventor Board. Unfortunately, there is a dead link to a GitHub repo in the forum. Does any other information for this board exists?

Thanks.

2

Hi,

There will be a block diagram available on hifiveinventor.com within a couple of weeks but there are currently no plans to make the schematic publicly available. There are also technical documents available on hifiveinventor.com for all of the major components on the board.

Thanks

3

Thank you very much for the information. Yes, I saw the data sheets of the components. However, if you don’t want to stick to the Tynker web front end, it is difficult to program the board without knowing which pins of the uC are connected to a component. At least, this information could be available if the MicroPython hifive library were provided.

4

To put my question in another way, will it be possible to program the HiFive Inventor Board using FreedomStudio / Freedom E SDK in C?

Thanks,
Matt

5

Hi Matt,
I’ve not got far with this, but have opened a discussion in the Pimoroni forum, over here: HiFive Inventor - Support - Pimoroni Buccaneers

The browser based editor appears to be using WebUSB to talk to the Segger debugger. That’s all I know about that so far.
The pinouts are similar to the micro:bit (but pin 12 differs).

It would appear that a first step toward a better IDE could be to have a “mode” on the Mu editor, as that also supports the micro:bit.

It would be a big step forward to have variable display, step in/over, and some sort of console output.
Also to just have some reference docs for the esp32 library being used for wifi etc.

6

Basically, it works with Freedom-E-SDK as it seems similar with the HiFive1RevB in some manners. I guess the bootloader is different and the esp32 only connected by uart. The gpio are matched as follows: gpio 0 -> p11 (button b), 1 -> p8, 2 -> p16, 3 -> p15, 4 -> p14, 5 -> p13, 9 -> p10, 10 -> p0, 11 -> p5 (button a), 12 -> p20, 13 -> p19, 19-> p9, 20 -> p1, 21-> p7, 22 -> p6, 16,17,18,23-> uart. The others pins of the edge connector (and adc function) seem to be offered by the esp32.

7

I’m not sure if it will help, but we ported the HiFive Unleashed board to KiCAD: