Just a quick “hi” to anyone else playing around with the HiFive Inventor. My initial thoughts:
- Good fun introduction for youngsters to embedded hardware
- Not the cheapest toy, but nice to have proper wifi and bluetooth as well as a bright LED display
The online learning videos have a good progression through Tynker to MicroPython. Occasionally fussy about making you drag and drop the code blocks exactly as shown before allowing you to save and move on.
It’s sufficiently capable that I’d be interested in trying to get a “proper” IDE / debugger hooked up to it, but unsure where to start, or whether it’s even allowed. You would hope it could be, given the open approach of RISC-V architecture.
The MicroPython examples make extensive use of these libraries:
hifive
esp32
neopixel
While a quick Google finds related libraries e.g. for the Micro:Bit, it would be nice to have reliable documentation for the HiFive implementation.
The homepage for “technical documentation” Doctor Who HiFive Inventor Coding Kit has datasheets linked. While that’s encouraging, there’s no other more basic information on the board (such as the edge connector pinout).
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