It will support PS/2 keyboards and VGA. Intended to be a learning platform for RISC-V coding, it’s only got 2k of RAM. (I tried finding a 3rd party source for this announcement but I struck out, so I’m linking the actual olimex webpage. Not affiliated with them, just thought this looked neat.)
The board costs about $10, I have one on hand. Besides VGA and PS/2 ports, it also has an audio-out jack and a slot for SD cards. And if you want to compare specs, the ESP32 blows this away. Sure $1 sounds impressive, until you realize just how little you can do with it.
[Edit] Looks like the price has come down under $10 for this board now, here’s a link to get them from China.
Thanks.
Funny, for me it shows $12.01 USD.
Now that’s 12 times the price of the Risc board, so of course it has to be more powerful.
If you make it another 12 times more expensive, you can have 4 Raspberry Pi or compatible, that are also way more powerful.
Add another 12 times to that, and you can have a full blown gaming PC.
Again it’s a coll concept, between an Arduino and a Raspberry PI.
Unfortunately it’s useless in many cases, because they’ve removed access to the pins.
Unfortunately it’s become pretty hopeless to order from China where I live. We pay $30 declaration fee, and on top of that 25% tax.
We still have a couple ESP32 left from before they tightened the rules on imports for personal use.
Hmm I’m seeing a sale price right now, might be based off my order history though. I found another that has a standard price of $10.39, but all the ones I looked at are now also including a shipping cost around $4.50 so that jacks the price up even more.
All these taxes and tarrifs and what-not are really hurting people’s ability to get access to affordable items. I was looking at some solar panels right before the US added a tarrif to those items, so now I’ll wait to see what happens.
They must have different prices for different regions, I’m also told the “normal” price is Kr 109,82 DKK = $16.16 USD. Shipping is $7.71.
If it was sent from EU when sold to EU, so there wasn’t any import fees or taxes, it would be very nice, but these sites rarely write where they are shipping from.
If you’re curious enough to get one, I’ve seen them on ebay as well. Might even be available on Amazon. I think they’ve been around for a couple years, I just got mine in April but still haven’t had time to fire it up and play with it.