Add support for BouffaloLab chips

[normanr]

Please add support for BL602/BL604 made by BouffaloLab

The BL602 is a general purpose microcontroller based on the “SiFive E24 Core” RISC-V processor.

Notice that it's only based on the SiFive E24 Core, so I don't think the existing SiFive platform will work for this chip.

There's a lot of documentation and SDK's avaiable:

• https://www.bouffalolab.com/bl602
• https://github.com/bouffalolab (SDK's, NuttX fork, flashing tools)
• en docs: https://pine64.github.io/bl602-docs/
• BL602 vs Other RISC-V Microcontrollers (includes a list of 3 example boards)
• https://github.com/mkroman/awesome-bouffalo

There is a "Nutcracker challenge" to re-implement the Wifi and BLE blobs as open source, but I hope that the official SDKs (with the closed blobs) will be sufficient to get it working with PlatformIO in the meantime.

Related requests:

• BL808 RISC-V support #4491

[normanr]

pine64/ArduinoCore-bouffalo looks like the start of an ArduinoCore Core for BL602 (found via mkroman/awesome-bouffalo)

[maxgerhardt]

Funny, I thought about a possible PlatformIO integration for these types of boards too after they were featured in a YouTube video yesterday. I think these boards will gain more attention through that soon.

But I think this issue should be moved to https://github.com/platformio/platform-sifive, the existing PlatformIO integration for SiFive boards. In fact it shouldn't be too hard to add a simple board definition + builder script for Arduino to that platform. I'll give it a try soon..

[maxgerhardt]

I've completed writing the PlatformIO support for the pine64 Boufallo core, which supports its BL602-based Pinecone board. The core isn't really specific to that board though, any BL602 board should work.

@normanr do you have a board and can test https://github.com/maxgerhardt/pio-bl602-boufallo-arduino-test?

[normanr]

I have a MagicHome LED controller with the BL602 chip, but I don't have anything set up to flash it at the moment. (The FTDI cable I used to flash the ESP8285 based MagicHome I bought a year ago has since been used to interface with an air quality sensor). I'd like to find some time in the next couple of weeks to try it out.

[normanr]

I got around to testing it today and initially it couldn't find eflash_loader_40m.bin. I updated the SiFive platform to pick up the get_contrib_path fix from ngkz, and it flashed onto my MagicHome LED controller without any issues.

One thing I noticed was that the ROM and RAM numbers listed in Platform IO don't match the docs at https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineCone. I'm not sure how much that matters.

Now to try and see if ESPHome or Tasmota will build! (or how badly they don't)

[maxgerhardt]

I got around to testing it today and initially it couldn't find eflash_loader_40m.bin. I updated the SiFive platform to pick up the get_contrib_path fix from ngkz, and it flashed onto my MagicHome LED controller without any issues.
I got a PR for that some time ago and merged it already, in pine64/ArduinoCore-bouffalo#6 (comment) I already tested it to be working.

You might want to delete <home folder>/.platformio/packages/tool-bl60x-flash to get the latest version upon the next upload and the upload problem should be solved.

[normanr]

Yep I found that, and that's what inspired me to manually trigger the update of the sifive package.

One issue I found during the process of trying to get Tasmota to build: LibraryPropertiesManifestParser._parse_platforms in https://github.com/platformio/platformio-core/blob/develop/platformio/package/manifest/parser.py hard-codes the mapping for architecture to platform, and if there's no entry in the map then the architecture is discarded (unlike LibraryJsonManifestParser._parse_platforms which falls back to adding the architecture as the platform).

The SPI and Wire libraries in ArduinoCore-bouffalo set architectures to riscv, so a mapping of "riscv": "sifive", is required to allow them to be used. A bit strange but it does work.

Also I noticed that in https://github.com/maxgerhardt/platform-sifive/blob/develop/boards/pinecone.json, mcu is set to sivife_e24, not sifive_e24. I'm guessing that's a typo?

[maxgerhardt]

trying to get Tasmota to build

The Arduino core is in an extremely early stage, with not even the base Arduino-API implemented, lest any WiFi library etc. I'm sure it's impossible to build at this stage without developing the Arduino core further first.

The SPI and Wire libraries in ArduinoCore-bouffalo set architectures to riscv, so a mapping of "riscv": "sifive", is required to allow them to be used. A bit strange but it does work.

Thanks, that's very interesting. The Arduino core might be just using the wrong architecture here, or I need to adapt the platform..