$10 RISC-V Development Board is an Arduino Alternative

RISC-V boards come in many different configurations, they even appear in soldering iron via Pine64's Pinecil. But if you are just dipping your toe into RISC-V then this $10 board could be of interest. A RISC-V microcontroller board from WCH with a total of eight UART interfaces is now available from China-based online store LCSC Electronics, as reported by CNX Software, and the company is looking for community contributions to its software.

In a tweet, WCH technical director, and RISC-V MCU Research Institute president, Patrick Yang, says that the "TX/RX function of [the] TCP client" has been realized, but that the "TCP server and UDP server / client need to be realized and improved," and calls on developers to actively submit to its GitHub repository.

• RISC-V4F processor, max 144MHz system clock frequency
• Single-cycle multiplication and hardware division, hardware float point unit (FPU) 
• 64KB SRAM，256KB Flash
• Networking – Gigabit Ethernet MAC, 10 Mbps PHY
• 80 I/O ports, can be mapped to 16 external interrupts
• Arduino pin layout
• Supply voltage: 2.5V/3.3V, GPIO unit is supplied independently
• Power-on/power-down reset (POR/PDR), programmable voltage detector (PVD)
• 2 general DMA controllers, 18 channels in total
• Single true random number generator (TRNG)
• 2 x 12-bit DAC
• 2-unit 16-channel 12-bit ADC, 16-channel TouchKey
• USB2.0 full-speed OTG interface
• USB2.0 high-speed host/device interface (built-in 480Mbps PHY)
• 3 USARTs, 5 UARTs
• 2 CAN interfaces (2.0B active)
• SDIO interface, FSMC interface, DVP
• 2 x I2C, 3 x SPI, 2 x IIS

The microcontroller allows control of its eight UART ports via Ethernet. UART - or universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter - is an asynchronous serial data bus for communicating with other hardware. It can function as an RS-232, or at other standards including RS-485.

For anyone interested in getting stuck into the board, which is out of stock at the time of writing, with the promise of more stock on the way, the manual can be downloaded from GitHub.