{"id":4003,"date":"2020-05-24T15:59:32","date_gmt":"2020-05-24T20:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.iachieved.it\/iachievedit\/?p=4003"},"modified":"2020-05-30T18:50:23","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T23:50:23","slug":"an-introduction-to-the-hifive-rev-b-and-risc-v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.iachieved.it\/iachievedit\/an-introduction-to-the-hifive-rev-b-and-risc-v\/","title":{"rendered":"An Introduction to the HiFive1 Rev B and RISC-V"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I’d like to introduce you to a new development board, the HiFive1 Rev B<\/a>. Equipped with a RISC-V Freedom E310 microcontroller<\/a> and designed with an Arduino Uno “form factor”, the HiFive1 Rev B is a neat little board that I hope to learn and develop for.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
My HiFive1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is a lot of material out there about RISC-V<\/a> and how it is going to change the future of CPUs, but what attracted me to it was the notion of a completely open standard<\/a> Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)<\/a>. That and I think working with new hardware and development environments is cool.<\/p>\n

Getting Started<\/h2>\n

The Getting Started Guide<\/a> is crucial to read. If you’re anything like me you want to dig in as quickly as possible with as little reading as possible, but trust me, reading the guide first is very useful.<\/p>\n

You don’t get anything but the HiFive1 Rev B board if you’ve ordered it from Crowd Supply<\/a> and will need a trusty USB-A male to USB-micro-B male cable<\/a>. This connection can be used for both serial communication and power. Of course, if you have only a system with USB-C you’ll need some set of adapters to get to USB micro-B.<\/p>\n

For the host platform we will be using a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) running macOS 10.15 (Catalina). Hopefully if you’re reading this with the intention of working on the HiFive1 with your Macbook Pro you’ll already have the best terminal program ever<\/a> installed, but if you don’t regular Terminal.app<\/code> works.<\/p>\n

Let’s see our boot screen first:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To see this boot screen you’ll need to use a serial terminal program. macOS is going to present the HiFive as the two USB modem devices in the \/dev<\/code> directory.<\/p>\n

\nls -1 \/dev\/cu*\n\/dev\/cu.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port\n\/dev\/cu.usbmodem0009790151821\n\/dev\/cu.usbmodem0009790151823\n<\/pre>\n
The first cu.usbmodem<\/code> device presented will be the HiFive1, and my suggestion is to open an iTerm and use screen<\/code> to connect to it.  115200 bps is your speed and the default 8N1 settings should work, so in our case screen \/dev\/cu.usbmodem0009790151821 115200<\/code> is all we had to type in the terminal.<\/p>\n
Time to Develop<\/h2>\n
There are several key pieces of software you’ll need to install on your Mac to begin developing on the HiFive1.<\/p>\n