At Embedded World 2025, we had the prospect to work with a board Pierre Dubouilh (one in all our lead embedded engineers) has been desperate to discover — DeepComputing’s newest RISC-V 64 growth board. It’s an thrilling platform, and this venture marked our first step in bringing Thistle Applied sciences’ OTA replace system to the RISC-V ecosystem.
The board itself is designed to be Framework-compatible, which allowed us to simply combine it right into a Cooler Grasp exterior case. Powered by the StarFive JH7110 — a 64-bit quad-core processor with SiFive U74 cores at 1.5 GHz — and working Ubuntu 24.04 out of the field, it provided a strong basis for our integration work.
Initially, we explored constructing our Rust-based replace system for the board. As anticipated with newer architectures, we bumped into some toolchain maturity points within the Rust ecosystem for RISC-V 64. So, we pivoted to our light-weight C-based OTA shopper — particularly designed for portability and supreme for this type of early-stage structure help.
As soon as arrange with USB-C to Serial and community connectivity, we had been in a position to compile and run the C shopper easily. The method was simple, and we shortly verified each native (USB-based) and distant OTA updates over Wi-Fi.
This effort is an thrilling milestone for us — not solely validating our method to OTA updates on new architectures, but additionally paving the way in which for broader help throughout rising platforms like RISC-V. It’s the results of deep technical focus and persistence from our engineering staff, and it displays the type of foundational work that usually occurs quietly however permits actual progress.
We’re trying ahead to persevering with this journey, particularly because the Rust toolchain matures for RISC-V 64 and we transfer towards full help in our main replace system.
Keep tuned — and comply with Thistle Applied sciences to see the place we go subsequent. We’ll quickly publish step-by-step instruction son our work with this board in our documentation web page!
