Getting Started with the SparkFun Red-V

2020-01-14 | By ShawnHymel

License: Attribution

RISC-V is a completely open source instruction set architecture (ISA) that can be used to implement various microcontrollers and microprocessors. SiFive (https://www.sifive.com/) is a fabless semiconductor company that designs and produces microcontrollers and microprocessors based on the RISC-V ISA.

In this tutorial, we will cover the basics of blinking an LED using the SparkFun Red-V board using a couple of different development environments. This video also covers the information found in this guide:

SparkFun Red-V Boards

SparkFun has developed two boards based on the SiFive E310 processor.

SparkFun Red-V boards

The Red-V RedBoard has the Arduino form factor, which allows you to use existing shields. The other is the Red-V Thing Plus board, which can be attached to breadboards more easily.

The main microcontroller found on both boards is the SiFive FE310-G002, which has the following features:

32 bit RV32IMAC core
256 MHz (max of 320 MHz)
16 kB RAM
4 MB onboard SPI flash

See this guide from SparkFun to learn more about the Red-V RedBoard or this guide to learn more about the Red-V Thing Plus.

We will cover two different ways of working with the Red-V boards. The first is the Freedom Studio IDE, which is based on the Eclipse IDE. With this method, we will program the microcontroller directly (i.e. bare-metal programming) using the Freedom Metal hardware abstraction layer (HAL). The second method is to use the Zephyr Project. Zephyr is a free and open source real-time operating system (RTOS) that contains a number of libraries to assist with networking, security, and digital communication.

Note that at this time, Freedom Studio works with all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac, and Linux) whereas Zephyr Project seems to only work on Linux.

Freedom Studio

Freedom Studio can be downloaded from here: https://www.sifive.com/boards/#software. We highly recommend following this guide from SparkFun to install Freedom Studio and any necessary drivers (Windows).

When you first launch Freedom Studio, you will be presented with a pop-up asking you to set your workspace. I will leave mine at default and click Launch.

Launch Freedom Studio

Close out of any other pop-ups, and in the main application, click File > New > Freedom E SDK Software Project. Change the Target to sifive-hifive1-revb, as the Red-V board is based on the HiFive1-RevB board. Change the Example Program to hello, which will give us a standard “Hello, World” template to start with. Change the name of the project to anything you want (e.g. “red-v-hello”).

Filling out project details in Freedom Studio

Click Finish and wait while the project builds. If asked to save changes for the configuration settings, click Don’t Save. You should be presented with a simple program that prints the string “Hello, World!\n” once to the console using printf. Because the string only prints once, you might miss is and have to press the reset button whenever you connect a serial console to the board.

To get around this, I’m going to add a simple forever loop around the print statement, so that it will continually try to print to the console. It’s a little messy, but it gets the job done:

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/* Copyright 2019 SiFive, Inc */
/* SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 */

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  while(1) {
    printf("Hello, World!\n");
  }
}

Save the file, and click on Run > Run Configurations. In the left pane, click on SiFive GDB SEGGER J-Link Debugging > red-v-hello (or whatever you named your project). Make sure that you have a .elf file listed under C/C++ Application, and click Run.

Setting up run configurations

Once your project is done building, click on the Launch Terminal button under the Terminal tab in the bottom-right pane. This will bring up a window asking you to configure your serial connection.

The Red-V board enumerates 2 different serial ports for programming and debugging. The printf() statement uses one of them, and it’s usually the second-highest port number. In this example, I had /dev/ttyACM1 and /dev/ttyACM2 listed as device files (i.e. these might be COM ports on Windows), so I chose to connect to /dev/ttyACM1. Try both if one does not seem to be working. Leave the baud rate at 115200, data size of 8, no parity, and 1 stop bit.

Serial terminal settings

Click OK. You should see the phrase “Hello, World!” being printed repeatedly in the console in the bottom-right pane.

Hello World

Click the Stop Button to halt the processor.

Let’s click File > New > Freedom E SDK and follow the same steps as above to create a new project for the hifive1-revb board based on the hello example program again. Give the project a new name, like red-v-blinky.

Creating a new project in Freedom Studio

Close out of any pop-ups, not saving changes. Replace the default code with the following code from SparkFun:

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/******************************************************************************
    RED-V_blink.c

    WRITTEN BY: Ho Yun "Bobby" Chan and "Tron Monroe"
    @ SparkFun Electronics
    DATE:  11/21/2019

    DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT SPECIFICS:
      Firmware developed using Freedom Studio v4.12.0.2019-08-2
      on Windows 10

    ========== RESOURCES ==========
    Freedom E SDK

    ========== DESCRIPTION ==========
    Using the built-in LED. To test with different pin,
    simply modify the reference pin and connect a standard LED
    and 100?O resistor between the respective pin and GND.

    LICENSE: This code is released under the MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
  ******************************************************************************/


#include <stdio.h>      //include Serial Library
#include <time.h>       //include Time library
#include <metal/gpio.h> //include GPIO library, https://sifive.github.io/freedom-metal-docs/apiref/gpio.html

//custom write delay function since we do not have one like an Arduino
void delay(int number_of_microseconds){ //not actually number of seconds

// Converting time into multiples of a hundred nS
int hundred_ns = 10 * number_of_microseconds;

// Storing start time
clock_t start_time = clock();

// looping till required time is not achieved
while (clock() < start_time + hundred_ns);

}

int main (void) {
  printf("RED-V Example: Blink\n");

  struct metal_gpio *led0; //make instance of GPIO

  //Note: The sequence of these commands matter!

  //Get gpio device handle, i.e.) define IC pin here where IC's GPIO = 5, pin silkscreen = 13
  //this is the GPIO device index that is referenced from 0, make sure to check the schematic
  led0 = metal_gpio_get_device(0);

  // quick check to see if we set the metal_gpio up correctly, this was based on the "sifive-welcome.c" example code
  if (led0 == NULL) {
    printf("LED is null.\n");
    return 1;
  }

  // Pins are set when initialized so we must disable it when we use it as an input/output
  metal_gpio_disable_input(led0, 5);

  // Set as gpio as output
  metal_gpio_enable_output(led0, 5);

  //Pins have more than one function, make sure we disconnect anything connected... 
  metal_gpio_disable_pinmux(led0, 5); 

  //Turn ON pin 
  metal_gpio_set_pin(led0, 5, 1);

  while (1) {//loop through, sort of like an Arduino loop()

      //Turn OFF pin
      metal_gpio_set_pin(led0, 5, 0);
      //Use custom "delay" function
      delay(2000000); //2000000 "micro-seconds" ~ 1 second, through experimentation...
      //Turn ON pin
      metal_gpio_set_pin(led0, 5, 1);
      //Use custom "delay" function
      delay(2000000);

  }

  // return
  return 0;
}

You will notice that we’re blinking pin 5 in this code, which is the pin connected to the onboard LED on the Red-V boards. You can view the schematics for the Red-V boards here:

Red-V RedBoard schematic

Red-V Thing Plus schematic

Save your file and click Run > Debug Configurations. Once again, make sure you have a .elf file listed under SiFive GDB SEGGER J-Link Debugging > red-v-bliny (or whatever you named your project). Click Debug.

Debug configurations

You can double-click to the left of code lines to add breakpoints and use the toolbar to resume and pause program execution as well as step into, over, and out of functions. This provides an easy way to perform step-through debugging on the SiFive processor using the onboard J-Link chip.

Debugging in Freedom Studio

While doing this, you should see the blue LED flash on the Red-V board.

Red-V blinking LED

Press the stop button to stop program execution and exit the GDB debugger when you are finished.

SiFive maintains the Freedom Metal HAL, which is a library that makes it easy to develop bare-metal programs for their chips. You can view the API documentation here: https://sifive.github.io/freedom-metal-docs/introduction.html

Zephyr Project

The Zephyr Project is a framework maintained by the Linux Foundation that aims to make a universal and accessible RTOS for many different microcontrollers. In addition to a task scheduler, Zephyr aims to provide various libraries for networking, security, and hardware control, which would make code written for Zephyr portable to many different microcontrollers.

Zephyr is still young at this point, so board support is limited, and it only builds under Linux. If you wish to try out the Zephyr Project for the Red-V (and similarly, the HiFive-revB board), follow the installation steps found here: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/red-v-development-guide#software-installation-zephyr-rtos. Note that I tried the following steps on Ubuntu 16.04.

Once you have Zephyr installed on your system, navigate to zephyrproject/zephyr/samples/basic. Make a copy of the blinky folder and rename it to something like blink_red-v.

Creating a new Zypher project

Go into that folder and into the src subfolder. Open main.c. The HiFive1-revB board has a predefined pin with DT_ALIAS_LED0_GPIOS_PIN constant that points to the pin connected to the onboard LED. Unfortunately, that is not the same pin used on the Red-V board. So, replace that constant with the number 5 (which corresponds to pin 5 on the board):

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/*
 * Copyright (c) 2016 Intel Corporation
 *
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
 */

#include <zephyr.h>
#include <device.h>
#include <drivers/gpio.h>

#define LED_PORT    DT_ALIAS_LED0_GPIOS_CONTROLLER
#define LED     5

/* 1000 msec = 1 sec */
#define SLEEP_TIME  1000

void main(void)
{
    u32_t cnt = 0;
    struct device *dev;

    dev = device_get_binding(LED_PORT);
    /* Set LED pin as output */
    gpio_pin_configure(dev, LED, GPIO_DIR_OUT);

    while (1) {
        /* Set pin to HIGH/LOW every 1 second */
        gpio_pin_write(dev, LED, cnt % 2);
        cnt++;
        k_sleep(SLEEP_TIME);
    }
}

Save that file, and open a terminal window. Navigate to the zephyr folder (in whichever directory you installed the Zephyr Project):

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cd ~/Projects/zephyrproject/zephyr/

From there, use the west metatool to build our sample program with the HiFive1-revB as the target board:

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west build -b hifive1_revb samples/basic/blinky_red-v/

Once that’s done, simply call the following to upload the compiled program to the board:

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west flash

At this point, you should see the LED on the Red-V board begin to blink. Note that Zephyr has some overhead, so it might take a few seconds for it to boot on the board after each reset.

Blinking LED on Red-V board

The API reference guide for the Zephyr Project can be found here: https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/reference/index.html

Resources and Going Further

We hope this has helped you get started with the new SparkFun Red-V boards! While there is no easy IDE (e.g. Arduino), to get you running with this set of RISC-V chips, there are some professional tools and a growing RTOS that holds a lot of promise.

Here are some resources to help you on your Red-V journey: