MangoPi-MQ1 Is an Ultra-Compact, Soon-to-be-Open Source Allwinner D1 RISC-V Dev Board
Designed to compete with the Nezha D1, this space-saving board could sell for under $10 when mass production begins next month.
Update 03/04/2022:
MangoPi has opened crowdfunding for its compact RISC-V single-board computer, now renamed to the MangoPi-Nezha MQ — but it arrives at a $39 price point, considerably above the sub-$10 price originally suggested.
The board's specifications remain as announced, with an Allwinner F133-A — a variant of the D1 which includes 64MB of on-board memory, rather than requiring an external DRAM chip — offering a single 64-bit XuanTie C906 RISC-V core running at 1GHz.
Interested parties can place an order for a board on Crowd Supply now with shipments to begin in July this year, and while the $39 asking price is above what was hoped it does at least include free worldwide delivery.
The project design files have also been published to GitHub, under an unspecified open-source license.
Original article continues below.
Single-board computer startup MangoPi has shown off prototypes of a low-cost development board based on the recently-open sourced XuanTie C906 RISC-V core — and promises that its own design will be released as open source once testing is complete.
Built around the same Allwinner D1 system-on-chip as the Nezha Linux-capable development board, the MangoPi-MQ1 — codenamed Sparrow — offers a single 1GHz 64-bit RISC-V core: The XuanTie C906, which Alibaba's T-Head division recently released under the permissive Apache 2.0 open source license.
MangoPi has confirmed board specifications as including 64MB (512Mb) of RAM, on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4 with a connector for an external antenna, microSD storage, on-board microphone, a Camera Serial Interface (CSI) input, and Display Serial Interface (DSI) and RGB video outputs. Two USB Type-C connectors offer power and data inputs and USB host functionality.
The board is to enter in to mass production some time in November, and while formal pricing has yet to be confirmed the company has stated that "minimum allocation" will be around $9.90 — making it a tenth the price of the Nezha board, albeit with considerably less RAM and no HDMI output or wired Ethernet capabilities.
On the software front, MangoPi has promised to provide a port of Allwinner's Tina Linux - itself a port of a somewhat-outdated version of OpenWRT designed for resource-constrained environments. The company has also pledged that its design will be open sourced once testing has been completed, though stopped short of offering a firm timescale.
More information on the project is available on the MangoPi Twitter account; completed boards will be placed for sale on Seeed Studio and Taobao when mass production has begun.