Seeed Studio Announces GD32 RISC-V Development Board, Its Latest GigaDevice GD32V-Powered Design

The company's latest and most powerful GD32V-based development board includes 80 GPIOs and an optional touch-sensitive LCD display panel.

Gareth Halfacree
4 years ago β€’ HW101

Seeed Studio is continuing to expand its family of development boards based around the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), this time launching a surprisingly large-format design powered by GigaDevice's GD32V microcontroller core.

Announced back in August, the GigaDevice GD32V family is designed to be a replacement for the company's earlier Arm-based GD32. Based on a 32-bit implementation of the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, the GD32 can run at up to 108MHz. It has also found its way into a few development boards, including the Sipeeed Longan Nano and the Adafruit Feather form factor Wio Lite RISC-V β€” and now the Seeed Studio GD32 RISC-V Dev Board can be added to the list.

Based on the more powerful GD32VF103VBT6 microcontroller variant, which includes the development board includes 32kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 128kB of on-chip flash, the board design includes 80 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins broken out into a pair of 2x24 headers, including five UARTs, two I2Cs, three SPIs, two I2Ses, two CAN 2.0s, and one full-speed USB (USBFS) buses. The board also includes additional memory in the form of 8MB of flash storage and a 256-byte EEPROM, plus a TransFlash/microSD slot for expansion.

As is common for Seeed's development boards, the GD32 RISC-V Dev Board includes an LCD display port β€” and an optional kit provides a 2.8" SPI-based 240x320 resistive-touch LCD panel, along with an example project to demonstrate its use. With or without LCD, power and data is provided over a USB Type-C connector as standard, while the board also includes two user-accessible buttons and three user-accessible LEDs.

As with the company's previous RISC-V releases, the GD32 RISC-V Dev Board is extremely pocket-friendly: Seeed is taking pre-orders priced at $6.90 board-only or $15.90 including bundled LCD. More information is available on the official product page, with the first shipments due to begin in mid November.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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