At Embedded World 2025, we had the possibility to work with a board Pierre Dubouilh (considered one of our lead embedded engineers) has been desirous to discover — DeepComputing’s newest RISC-V 64 improvement board. It’s an thrilling platform, and this mission 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 operating Ubuntu 24.04 out of the field, it provided a stable 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 consumer — particularly designed for portability and superb for this sort of early-stage structure assist.
As soon as arrange with USB-C to Serial and community connectivity, we had been capable of compile and run the C consumer easily. The method was easy, and we rapidly verified each native (USB-based) and distant OTA updates over Wi-Fi.
This effort is an thrilling milestone for us — not solely validating our strategy to OTA updates on new architectures, but in addition paving the way in which for broader assist throughout rising platforms like RISC-V. It’s the results of deep technical focus and persistence from our engineering workforce, and it displays the type of foundational work that always occurs quietly however permits actual progress.
We’re wanting ahead to persevering with this journey, particularly because the Rust toolchain matures for RISC-V 64 and we transfer towards full assist in our major replace system.
Keep tuned — and comply with Thistle Applied sciences to see the place we go subsequent. We are going to quickly publish step-by-step directions on our work with this board in our documentation web page!
