HiFive1 Boards Have Been Released!

The HiFive1 is an Arduino-Compatible development kit featuring the Freedom E310, the industry’s first commercially available RISC-V SoC.

Get yours today here! https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1

Documentation: https://dev.sifive.com/hifive1/

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After long waiting, I am very unhappy and very disappointed to learn that my Founder’s Edition was rejected by the German customs authorities due to the lack of the CE certification logo which must be embossed on the PCB. They have returned my puchase back to the sender :rage: Are you working on getting this logo included in future production cycles, and can you reprocess my returned Founder’s Edition to comply with Germany customs regulations?

Hopefully, and thanks,

We’re very sorry to hear that this happened. We don’t believe that the HiFive1, as a development board, requires the CE mark. As far as I know our other shipments to the EU and Germany have gone through without a problem.

We are looking into your specific order and will remedy this ASAP. Thanks for your patience and support!!

Darn.

My Founder’s Edition was picked up in Portland on December 23 and last scanned “Departed UPSP Facility, LOS ANGELES” at 10:04 Am on December 27. No further activity since :frowning:

Hi Jack,
Thank you for having this looked into. I appreciate your effort. The customs official told me that they were lax on the CE requirement in the past, but that due to severel burn up incidents they are now enforcing the law 100%. You may be right about the development board criterium, but I am at the mercy of the officials. If they say “no”, I have no leverage to dispute it. I hope you can come up with some solution, and I would expect other backers from Germany will be facing the same problem.

I would also have thought that most low volume dev boards don’t have CE certification. Raspberry Pi does. I was surprised to find photos showing that Orange Pi and CubieBoard do.

My Odroid boards don’t seem to have CE on them, but I found compliance documentation on their web site (and KCC and FCC too):


http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=en:xu4:en:ce_odroid-xu4.pdf

Maybe you’re going to need to look into that.

Bruce, in your case, can you please email orders@crowdsupply.com with details on your order?
They should be able to help track your board.

Today’s the first day back at work after the New Year holidays. Absolutely everything shuts down during this time. So I hope It’ll turn up shortly. But I’ll give them a ping.

Thanks! Got my Founders edition yesterday!
Unfortunately had to pay 18EUR in taxes. Worth it though! :slight_smile:

Hi Paulo,

Happy to hear that you got your board! Can you help to confirm what country the board was shipped to? This will help us track the international shipping/customs/tax issues so what we can (hopefully) improve the situation over time!

Hi Donnie, I have tried emailing you to check on your status but not sure if you received it. Can you email me at info@sifive.com if you still haven’t gotten your board?

Wilco

My board finally arrived! I’m going to be really dangerous now :slight_smile:

https://twitter.com/BruceHoult/status/824965355755991041

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Yay! Sorry for how long all these international shipments take.

Hi all,
sad to hear that there are problems with German customs office. I’m also from Germany and placed an order for the February shipment of HiFive. I have heard from these types of problems in the past, but it never happened to myself. It seems to depend also on the indivudell policy of the local customs office.
Last year I successfully received a Papilio Pro FPGA board from GadgetFactory.
To my experience it is important that the board is classified as “printed circuit board” and also as “engineering sample”. The customs officer must be convinced that it is an electronic component to be assembled into a product and not a “consumer product”.

Because shipping for the next wave has not started there may be a chance to classify it accordingly. I can also offer to call my local customs office and ask them for their requirements.

Thomas

Mine says on the customs declaration “PCBA development kit”. You’d think that should be clear enough, but maybe adding something like “engineering sample” would not hurt. Maybe replace the “Development kit” part with that.

Thanks for the feedback and the generous offer to check with your local customs office.

I have passed it along to CrowdSupply, who handles all of our logistics in shipping these boards, and will let you know if they have specific questions and/or requests.

Next batch is getting packaged up for shipment on 2/10 as we speak…

It looks like an update regarding my awaited delivery might be in order now. The 2nd HiFive1 shipment attempt was again stopped at german customs (see link below). I am still waiting for the customs notification as to why clearance has been halted, but I am not particularily hopefull of the restults. Shipments sent via FedEx seem to get through without any problems, but I have yet to receive a shipment delivered via USPS.

Note that the “delivered” status shown in the link simply means USPS has delivered to the customs office and apparantly have thus “washed their hands” of any futher responsibilities.

https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction?qtc_tLabels1=LZ630480015US

Donnie,
that it is stopped at the customs office is nothing to worry by itself. USPS does not handle customs, so in most cases you need to collect the shipment at the customs office (and pay the taxes…).
Thomas

Mine took a very long time to get to Moscow (over a month), but fortunately no customs or taxes and it came right to a Post Office about 500 meters from home/work.

They wanted another $5 to actually deliver it to the address on the package, but I was happy to take a short walk.