Mike Bell

Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x A powerful new RISC-V microcontroller with mostly open RTL

Interested in trying out a Baochip-1x? The 'dabao' evaluation board is now taking pre-orders on Crowd Supply: www.crowdsupply.com/baochip/dabao

Yeah that makes sense!

I’m just doing these things for fun at the moment, so everything is open so people can make their own if they want (and I don’t really want to get into the logistics of selling stuff)

I was planning on making something with HDMI shaped DVI output using RP2350, but using an FPGA for more flexible composition is interesting. Will your gateware be open source?

That looks great! If there was an option to interface at 3v3 it would be usable, but ideally I’d want 16-bit data and more address bits.

Mike Bell (@rebelmike@hachyderm.io) Attached: 1 image I2C now works! I've been quickly testing with the Pimoroni sensor stick that came with the Tufty. It was straightforward to port the Pico BMP280 example to work with RV4028, and I...

I'm mostly posting about RV4028 on Fedi, if you want to follow in more detail: hachyderm.io/@rebelmike/1...

My RV4028 computer is getting to the point where video output would be nice. Maybe I can rig up PicoTerm on the VGA demo board...

Anyway - for now I'm controlling the on board LEDs with a Pimoroni QwST Pad!

I’m Tired Of These Useless Jackasses Making The Computer Expensive RAM, flash memory, and HDDs are unaffordable because of a bunch of greedy idiots that do not love the computer.

The tech oligarchs pushing AI do not care if you can afford a computer, because they do not truly love the computer. aftermath.site/ram-prices-hdd...

Absolutely insane story about a middle-aged woman from Hertfordshire who got arrested, shackled, and detained by ICE and held in a prison for eight weeks.... while on holiday... with a valid tourist visa... as she tried to leave the country.

A square PCB labelled RV4028 RISC-V Hackable Computer There’s 5 80 pin 2mm pitch sockets on it , a USB port at the top, and WS2812 LEDs down the right hand side (one next to each socket). There’s a logo of a small podgy dragon with tiny wings is in the top right corner, next to the USB socket

RV4028 IO module in the back slot of the backplane.

The RV4028 computer with IO, RAM and CPU modules populated

I got the boards for my RISC-V computer fabricated. I've been documenting the bringup over on Fedi, but the conclusion is - it works!

The thread here has lots more details: hachyderm.io/@rebelmike/1...

“Are you firmly in favour of rejoining the European Union?" - Robert Peston

“Firmly very much in favour. Brexit has been a disaster under any criteria, under any measure" - Zack Polanski

Looking forward to this tonight - there are some really cool designs on TT08!

My Bluesky Tufty app is coming along, it can now view images and display and open quoted posts

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.”

hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

Ah, this'll be why it took multiple attempts to reply to a comment on a PR just now...

How worried should we be about GitHub just failing completely one day? Seems like they might have more AI agents than people that actually know what they are doing working on it...

Introducing Tufty2350 - A smart interactive badge powered by Raspberry Pi RP2350! 16MB flash, 8MB PSRAM, WiFi+BT, 1000mAh battery, and a 2.8" IPS display - a whole lot of goodies in a gorgeous shell.😲 Now available to order: shop.pimoroni.com/products/tuf...

I think it is possible to work out how to poke the GPIOs on a Pi 5 from the knowledge that the address 0x1F_0000_0000 - 0x1F_0040_0000 from the Pi corresponds to 0x4000_0000 - 0x4040_0000 on RP1, and the constants in github.com/raspberrypi/...

But if noone has done it already it might be a slog!

I suspect there are memory mapped (RP1) registers you can use for this in Pi 5. I’ll see if I have any old notes from when I was hacking on this stuff.
Though it’s debatable whether it’s a good idea as you’re bypassing any ownership of the config.

Anyone got a userspace bitbang i2c driver for the Pi before I go trying to mangle my own together? 🤣

I’d use the kernel i2c but device tree doesn’t want to let me share pins between SPI (display init) and I2C (touch controller) no matter how nicely I ask.

But anyway I think in the maker community it is especially important to stay away from it, if the goal is something hackable and educational you shouldn’t be starting from slop!

Yeah that was my initial position but I’ve begun to think it might persist. Clearly when the bubble pops there’ll be a big reduction in usage but I don’t think it’s going to go away completely.

Indeed, I’m just going to continue to enjoy hacking on stuff.
There’s a question of how many jobs doing that might continue to exist, but I’m in the fortunate position of not needing to worry about that providing things doing go too wrong!

Sadly I suspect that means there’s going to be a lot of lower quality software about (see recent Windows updates), rather than people deciding that getting LLMs to write all of their software is a bad idea.

And also, as you say, it doesn’t look that great for the jobbing programmer..

What’s left for now at least is reviewing, debugging and maintaining the resulting system.
But I’m not sure how you do that for a system you don’t understand at a low level.

I feel like the bit I of being a programmer I enjoy most, and am best at, is the bit that’s in most danger of being eliminated. Namely: understanding a whole bunch of new stuff and coming up with a decent initial implementation.

YouTube video by Ancient Digital Iris

"Animated Bokeh" has been on my whiteboard for a long time, and this is the result.

I thought it would just be for cheesy novelty effects, but it also does lightfield manipulation that was cooler than I expected.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_2...

Badgeware Tufty A smart interactive badge with colour 2.8" TFT display, powered by Raspberry Pi RP2350.

It's a one of these shop.pimoroni.com/products/tuf...

RP2350 based conference badge thing, squirrel themed. It's very nicely put together!

Yep! bsky.app/profile/char...

Work in progress BlueSky app on my Pimoroni Tufty!

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If you want a point of comparison, I think on the boat we normally get through around 200GB a month..