●Description

The SparkFun RED-V (pronounced “red-five”) Thing Plus is a low-cost, development board in our popular Thing Plus footprint and adds in the Freedom E310 core and RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). What sets the RED-V Thing Plus apart is the completely open-source approach from hardware to ISA. That means anyone can make full use the microcontroller without requiring royalties, licenses, or non-disclosure agreements.

The RED-V Thing Plus comes programmed with a simple bootloader The modern USB-C connector makes it easy to program over USB connectivity or use as a JTAG interface via the FE310's NXP K22 ARM Cortex-M4. Since the Thing Plus footprint is also Feather-compatible, you can take advantage of existing shield options. We have included a Qwiic connector to enable future use of our handy plug-and-play I²C Qwiic Connect System which means no soldering or shields are required*. With so much freedom & growing industry functionality, the SparkFun RED-V Thing Plus is an ideal choice for your RISC-V project.

The on board Freedom E310 (FE310) is the first member of the Freedom Everywhere family of customizable SoCs from SiFive. Designed for microcontroller, embedded, IoT, and wearable applications, the FE310 features SiFive's E31 CPU Coreplex, a high-performance, 32-bit RV32IMAC core. Running at 150MHz, the FE310 is among the fastest microcontrollers in the market. Additional features include a 16KB L1 Instruction Cache, a 16KB Data SRAM scratchpad, hardware multiply/divide, a debug module, flexible clock generation with on-chip oscillators and PLLs, and a wide variety of peripherals including UARTs, QSPI, PWMs, and timers. Multiple power domains and a low-power standby mode ensure a wide variety of applications can benefit from the FE310. The RED-V Thing Plus requires Freedom Studio software or a Zephyr RTOS build environment set up to program the board and interface with it.

Note: Please be aware that Qwiic Libraries are not yet available for the Freedom Studio SDK or the Zephyr environment that runs on the FE310. We will update the community when these become available.

Get Started With the SparkFun RED-V Thing Plus Hookup Guide

●Features

• Feather Compatible Footprint
• Microcontroller: SiFive Freedom E310 (FE310-G002)
  • CPU: SiFive E31 CPU
  • Architecture: 32-bit RV32IMAC
  • Speed: 150MHz
  • Performance: 1.61 DMIPs/MHz
  • Memory: 16 KB Instruction Cache, 16 KB Data Scratchpad
  • Other Features: Hardware Multiply/Divide, Debug Module, Flexible Clock Generation with on-chip oscillators and PLLs
• Operating Voltage: 3.3 V and 1.8 V
• External Wakeup Pins: 1 (& button)
• Host Interface (USB-C): Program, Debug, and Serial Communication
• Qwiic Connector