Still in progress but lemme explain why it’s important…

Head over to the Seeed online store for embedded gadgets… And you’ll see a couple of new, ridiculously low-cost development boards based on GigaDevice GD32 VF103 and the RISC-V processor…

New, ridiculously low-cost development boards based on GigaDevice GD32 VF103 and the RISC-V processor

(The $16 bundle at the right includes a 2.8-inch touchscreen… Without the touchscreen it’s only $7… Which includes 8 MB of onboard flash memory!)

I expect a flood of cheap GD32 VF103 RISC-V developer boards coming real soon… Because of its odd connection to STM32 Blue Pill, a popular and cheap development board based on the Arm processor.

But RISC-V and Arm are completely different CPUs… How could the GD32 VF103 be connected to STM32 Blue Pill?

Let’s connect the dots…

1️⃣ STM32 Blue Pill is a development board based on a microcontroller built by STMicroelectronics… STM32 F103

2️⃣ Yes, the STM32 F103 microcontroller contains an Arm Cortex-M3 CPU

3️⃣ What’s the name of the new low-cost microcontroller with a RISC-V CPU? GD32 VF103… Sounds familiar?

4️⃣ No coincidence that GD32 VF103 sounds similar to STM32 F103… But their brains are different… RISC-V vs Arm!

5️⃣ Has someone surgically transplanted a RISC-V Brain into a Blue Pill Body…?

It sounds like a Frankenstein experiment… But this is no Halloween joke, we really have a strange creature here that works like Blue Pill but has the brains of a RISC-V processor!

I’m confused myself… But since I’m 100% certain we’ll see many more Frankenstein 103… er… GD32 VF103 creatures around us, I have decided to port the Apache Mynewt Embedded OS to harness the power of this new creature. (So that we can all exploit it for meaningful purposes, like IoT)

Here is my story so far…