Cheap Risc-V Supercluster for $2 (DIY, CH32V003)

Рет қаралды 244,940

Күн бұрын

Sponsor: JLCPCB 1-20 layer PCB from $2, PCBA from $0, Sign up to Get $54 Coupons here: jlcpcb.com/?from=bitluni
Available for Flex, Rogers,PTFE Teflon, Copper Core, Aluminum and FR-4
I couldn't resist to make a RISC-V Supercluster. The CH32V003 MCUs are only 10 cents each so I couldn't resist to put 16 of those on one PCB. That comes with all sorts of challenges. But it's only a little practice for what's going to come...
Parts & tools(affiliate links):
CH32V003: aliexpress.bitluni.net/ch32v003
Edge Connectors: aliexpress.bitluni.net/edgeConn
Preheating Station (only $50 shipped): aliexpress.bitluni.net/heatin...
My camera and lens (4k 60fps): amazon.bitluni.net/gh5
Zoom H6 Audio Recorder: amazon.bitluni.net/h6
0:00 Intro cheap Risc-V
0:50 Cluster design
2:20 PCB Ordering and part management
3:26 My first 4-Layer PCBs
3:50 Assembly
4:55 Blind design gone wrong
5:44 Sometime we are lucky
6:44 Open drain bus protocol
7:27 First blink program
8:22 to be continued...
plz share :-)
Paypal: paypal.me/bitluni
Github Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/bitluni
Patreon: / bitluni
Channel membership: / @bitluni
Twitter: @bitluni
reddit: u/bitluni
Discord: / discord
#electronics #riscv

Пікірлер: 336

@hstrinzel Жыл бұрын

Amazing that you can remain that cheerful and positive on SUCH DIFFICULT projects! Well done and keep right on going! I also enjoyed your earlier ESP32 breakthroughs.

@BangkokBubonaglia Жыл бұрын

Make a fast phased ADC. You have 64 ADC's. Apparently the ADC clock is 24 MHz, 10 bit sigma delta conversion. That means you should be able to get 2MHz conversions. If you get the timing right, starting each conversion at exactly the correct clock phase, you may be able to build up to a 128 MHz, 10 bit ADC. That is damn fast for a $2 component. Of course, you'll have very limited memory so you won't get a very long sample window. Even if you only store 8 of the 10bits, that is a maximum of 512 samples per channel at 2MHz, or 256uSec of data. You'll need to make sure all the chips are synchronized to an external clock. It would be interesting to see what you can actually achieve given the real limitations of the hardware. After you know, you can turn it into a very cheap, albeit slow oscilloscope.

@igordasunddas3377 Жыл бұрын

I'm just a software engineer, but this hardware stuff always fascinates me. Awesome video! Thank you!

@vaisakhkm783 Жыл бұрын

ikr... i get into software from making hardware stuff... but it stuck with me, now i am also just software engineer..... all these hardware projects making me go back to old days...

@hansdietrich83 Жыл бұрын

Normally, when you make a 4+ layer board, you use the internal layers as power planes. On the one hand it is very convenient to just put a via next to each VCC and GND pad and be done with routing power, on the other hand, it provides proper return paths for the signal traces, as they are electromagnetically coupled to the nearest reference plane. Robert Feranec has some really interesting videos about proper PCB design practices

@johnmoore5319 Жыл бұрын

But making the internal layers power planes and the external ones GND doesn't just introduce a parasitic capacitor? and should you make copper pours in the internal layers or just leave the routes?

@hansdietrich83 Жыл бұрын

@@johnmoore5319 1. you definitely want to use at least one of the internal planes as ground to get an uninterrupted gnd plane. 2. Yes, you introduce capacitance, but the capacitance is between the power and gnd planes, so it is actually desirable. Also, this capacitance is so small, it is basically negligible. 3. The internal planes should only be used as a continuous planes. The signals are routed on the outer layers or on internal signal layers, not the layers that are used as power planes. This way, you always have a signal layer and a power plane layer next to each other, which is great for signal integrity. 4. The question if you should pour GND on the outer layers is a while different discussion (too long for this comment) 5. Bonus tip: always place a GND via next to a signal via, so the return current can switch reference plane as well All these topics are discussed in Roberts videos at length

@BlackDreaded Жыл бұрын

@@johnmoore5319 As hansdietrich said watch the videos of Robert Feranec - I binged those and I am not even that deep in PCB design. They are awesome.

@nonchip Жыл бұрын

@@johnmoore5319 sprinkling caps all over the general vicinity of ICs also introduces capacitances, that's the whole idea of why we do that: to turn the power supply of everything in our circuit into a capacitor, which filters out any spikes. also note "power planes" means power planes, not "VCC". GND *is* a "power". so if you have 4 layers you'd stack like this: signal, gnd, vcc, signal. and yes, planes mean planes, not routes.

@avinadadmendez4019 Жыл бұрын

It also has to be mentioned that properly sizing your power delivery requirements is important, not all circuit boards require dedicated power planes, in fact, you can get by just routing power tracks in most simple MCU boards with low current transient requirements. Current transients are what determine how careful must your power routing be. I have used power planes for complex microprocessor boards. But for simple low power MCU boards? I just route power tracks, works perfectly fine and gives me some extra board area to work with, it also allows to cut 6 layer boards to just 4 layers. Overengineering can be as harmful as bad engineering, when you spend $800 building prototypes that may as well have costed $200

@apaskiewicz Жыл бұрын

Holy sheet. I have never seen your channel before, and I'm in awe! Thank you so much for this video!

@IONYVDFC Жыл бұрын

Your enthusiasm is infectious :-) I would love to see a cluster like this solve large parallel synthesiser calculations or other audio conversion modules like digital reverb. Pure Data is a great starting point which has been around for decades as an IDE (as a simplified GUI) for modular synthesis on x86 and ARM based SBC's. I know I am probably dreaming now, but since Risc-V is open source thing, I can imagine using this flexibility to developing an instruction set tailored to digital signal processing.

@MrZomhad Жыл бұрын

This is sick! Can‘t wait for the super super cluster! :D

@ikocheratcr Жыл бұрын

If the CPUs could talk between each other, a neural network would be pretty fun.

@bitluni Жыл бұрын

they can, they will, it fun

@vsabadazh Жыл бұрын

I could help with adapting tensorflow for this thing, did this at a previous job!

@coenraadloubser5768 11 ай бұрын

@@vsabadazh Tinygrad might be a better fit...

@congchuatocmay4837 10 ай бұрын

SwitchNet or SwitchNet4.

@Aziqfajar 8 ай бұрын

I wonder how it will perform.

@melvinolson8381 Жыл бұрын

When he showed the super large tiled panel at the end of the video, it reminded me of startrek computers with all the blinking lights.

@raptordad6653 Жыл бұрын

Bitluni, you’re obviously unaware but almost all of the KZfaq movies that have inspired me, intrigued me and given me experiment ideas have been yours. You are awesome. Thank you 😊👍

@outbakjak Жыл бұрын

I've never heard anyone refer to a KZfaq video as a "KZfaq movie" 😆 but cool imma start saying that

@peter.stimpel Жыл бұрын

finally, some good use of the Pink LED fundings. Nice.

@kayezero703 Жыл бұрын

Bro wake up bitluni uploaded a new video

@TheTinkerDad Жыл бұрын

"How many cores are too many?" - you're the Ivan Miranda of electronics :) I can't wait to see what can you do with this cluster!

@icebluscorpion Жыл бұрын

There is a trick for the runny solder paste let it partially dry out In The open and don't use it right away. On the other scenario where the paste is to hard you can add liquid flux to get the consistency right just mix the dry out old paste with the new one until consistency is perfect.

@freakinccdevilleiv380 Жыл бұрын

Spreading some on a piece of paper may do the trick too

@icebluscorpion 11 ай бұрын

@@freakinccdevilleiv380 sure for very small badges and quick bodge jobs Is this method suitable but for quality production/repair is this method (solder paste on paper) very wasteful, expensive and unnecessarily Laborioso.

@tangiblewaves9730 Жыл бұрын

"you know, I like it cheap" - totally my attitude too! To get the most out of the cheapest parts is soo much fun,isn't it! A really great video; you have one more subscriber! ✌❤

@rbamba1731 Жыл бұрын

Really cool! Gonna wait for an update for the bus upgrade.

@oscarcharliezulu Жыл бұрын

I remember working on a Sun Sparc with two 50 mhz processors and it was considered a high end workstation at the time! Here are 16, 48mhz RISC processors on a pcb the size of the sparc cpu.

@freakinccdevilleiv380 Жыл бұрын

That's sick man 💯 Hadn't watched your videos in a while. Bitluini = GOD of Led screens

@jamesmor5305 Жыл бұрын

Your projects are always amazing. I hope the cluster can be useful to make many parallel Task

@phildem414 Жыл бұрын

Uber cool little project! Reminds of early 2000's custom dsp boards that did the same to make realtime multi algorithm sound processing boards. I wonder with cool application you imagine for this!

@mervmartin2112 Жыл бұрын

DEC's PDP series used a buss master so wouldn't have data collisions. Love the cluster!

@dreznik Жыл бұрын

you are a hardware production genius!

@R1D9M8B4 Жыл бұрын

I lost count on how many times my man... my teacher.. my idol... my role model said cheap. I feel SINCERE SHAME for not being subscribed. I need more of this mans in my life no homo.

@The-Weekend-Warrior 11 ай бұрын

OH MY GOD.... :) Just discovered your channel... where have you been until now??!!! :D:D:D Love this content.

@profdc9501 Жыл бұрын

Perhaps consider using a PNP constant current pull-up on the open drain bus to help speed things up. This could be as simple as a current mirror with 2N3906. This will probably at least double the speed of the bus.

@therealjammit Жыл бұрын

Be careful with using PNP. They're normally "slower" than NPN and the fast ones are more expensive. I was thinking of doing what we did in the old SCSI days. Use two resistors (normally around 240 ohms) in series. For a 5v signal that would give you a 2.5v source with an impedance of 120 ohms (a voltage regulator with a series resistance will do the same thing). Depending on the drive capability the equivalent series resistance might require different resistors (for example if a 500 ohm impedance is needed use two 1k ohm resistors).

@big0bad0brad Жыл бұрын

I wish they binned JFETs for zero gate voltage current

@cheponis Жыл бұрын

@@big0bad0brad They sort-of do. See Art of Electronics to explain.

@big0bad0brad Жыл бұрын

@@cheponis Yeah the bins are just too large tho, I'm thinking parts you could order in resistor precisions

@cheponis Жыл бұрын

@@big0bad0brad Wrap the FET around an op amp, that will get you what you want.

@Pixelcrafter_exe Жыл бұрын

Following the idea of maximizing mcu count you could for cost efficiency look for adressable led strips with use a mcu as controller chip for the insividual led groups. It would then just be a matter of bridging over the diodes which block the upstream comunication.

@captainpumpkinhead1512 Жыл бұрын

Holy hell. That's incredible!

@ainu_channel Ай бұрын

This is mindblowing

@mrrummynosetetra Жыл бұрын

Rendering the Mandelbrot set would be a good way to show the scaling properties of the supercluster since its algorithm is small and parallelizes well. It would be fun to see each ch32v003 with a neo-pixel and then create a display for the mandelbrot set with a matrix of superclusters (ping-pong balls would be a nice extra :)

@erascarecrow2541 Жыл бұрын

That could work... Though i'd like to see it efficiently let me run ffmpeg to do video encoding on the newer codecs like AV1. I'd be VERY happy with it, if i got say 256 cores encoding video at profile 1 or 2 at an acceptable speed. I consider acceptable speed about 2-4x longer encoding than the video playback is). The space savings in most cases are anywhere from 1/4th to 1/2 the size (at least compared to h264) Depends on how scalable this would be. Hundreds or thousands of cores, so long as you can avoid major bottlenecks in ram you'd be able to make a really cheap useful processing center.

@Really2950 Жыл бұрын

Definitely smarter and a cut above the usual electronics channels. I’d love to know what you do in your day job

@helmutzollner5496 Жыл бұрын

Interesting. Sitting tight for the next instalment.

@johboh Жыл бұрын

Nice job! Very inspiring!

@BRUXXUS Жыл бұрын

Incredible work! I’m sad that I’ve not been able to catch many streams lately.

@Gigawipf Жыл бұрын

Interesting that you can program those all together. That would really make it much easier when dealing with many microcontrollers on a bus. Thought about those options as well with the STM32 ARM SWD interface but assumed because there is a handshake that it won't work anyways. Might be different here.

@davidw.2467 Жыл бұрын

You could program the cluster into a small neural network and train them to recognize simple patterns. That would be real fun.

@8bit711 Жыл бұрын

Slick work Bro! dope.

@Octoate Жыл бұрын

But can it run Doom 😁?

@UFAnders Жыл бұрын

Oh my god who is this wonderful dude

@SupernovaSpence 11 ай бұрын

CSMA/CD is basically what you’re implementing. It’s great if all of your cores are responding to the exact same code and handing out tasks to each core because each core can be listening for the same code and then you can feed each core the variables individually and they will get to work independently. The draw back comes when you are trying to handle each core independently on different tasks and different programs and they are completing at different times. Each device pining for attention around the same time exponentially reduces through put because they are all on the same collision domain. If you can’t avoid this, then maybe you can multiplex 4 cores in 4 rows together so you have 4 more collision domains. You would see a 4 fold increase in communications speed. Ideally, each core would have its own communication channel. Another alternative would be to use interrupts so there are no collision domains, also significantly increasing through put.

@jimbronson687 Жыл бұрын

Very cool engineering big fellow.

@pixeledi Жыл бұрын

awesome work!!!!

@kmcderm133 Жыл бұрын

I had this idea years ago when I was building a project with uc's, but I had'have no way to implement it. I'm very glad to see this working, even if I didn't do it! :) I don't suppose there's a kit of this available?

@prashanthb6521 Жыл бұрын

You are a genius guy.

@pilliozoltan6918 Жыл бұрын

Low Pin-count Debug Interfaces for Multi-device Systems is a good article about how to program multiple MCUs with a single programmer bus. In short: with JTAG it's easy, with SWD it's possible in some cases.

@8bit711 Жыл бұрын

6:14 I fully yelled out loud YES! Even got goosebumps.

@domnik9062 Жыл бұрын

bought that hot plate a few weeks ago as well haha. Works fine

@CausticCatastrophe Жыл бұрын

this is already insane

@inlywang8157 Жыл бұрын

Cool project, informative as always

@alexandermcalpine Жыл бұрын

Great post! neat.

@satibel Жыл бұрын

I'm interested to see how many triangles they could output per second. something that might be cool would be to add a pair of ram chips and use double buffering then use the master to output the framebuffer to a screen. (you could use a clock and a counter to do the fast switching and just have to handle the blanking.) you could use a DDR chip (e.g. MT46V32M16P-5B) that can give you 16 bit RGB565 color you can directly feed to an adc per channel (probably a resistor ladder with a high speed op amp like 3 SN10501D or a single LMH6683 would work) if the processing is too slow you could just redraw the same frame till it's done, and then swap the buffers on the next vblank.

@plutonianfairy Жыл бұрын

Could you please link that stream where you developed the communication protocol?

@nkronert Жыл бұрын

Hey, it's a baby Connection Machine! 🤗

@domoledlight Жыл бұрын

I want to thanks you a lot so much because you made me enjoy electronic and win a lot of time when i started 7 years ago when you made me discover the esp8266 than i switch to esp32 the best mcu ever. Has i don't have your level 😢 i made a 3 esp32 mcu motherboard working with simple interrupt to make an advance domotic box witch one still working in my house and some customer. My next project is to discover stm32h7 world with cube mx it seems to be a gaz factory 😅 we will see if i have any succes.

@bernardogalvao85 Жыл бұрын

I wish I could understand this. Because it looks awesome!

@rbelatamas 11 ай бұрын

great video ❤ may i ask what is the pcb editor app name?

@KimTiger777 Жыл бұрын

Voice recognition is quite CPU intensive although I don't know how well it would perform on this cluster. I know there is a open source project for droids that aims to be bi-directional communication with a human, but one of the things hindering it from being fully autonomous droid is that it is quite cumbersome to drag a laptop around including extra battery. Using smaller components could potentially solve this problem. It probably would be a daunting task to accomplish.

@charlesskomp5362 Жыл бұрын

Seems like a good hobbyist gpu project to me!

@tangiblewaves9730 Жыл бұрын

One Question: Which development enviromnent do you use for the WCH controllers? VS Code? I'd love to hear about your experiences! (Sorry if I have overlooked the info...)

@playdav485 Жыл бұрын

hi it would be interesting to see if that could be programed to be a neural net to get complicated outputs from simple inputs

@n00ter99 7 ай бұрын

This is freakin awesome

@AlanTwoRings Жыл бұрын

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

@TomaszStachewicz Жыл бұрын

Oh, perfect, right when I got my package of CH32 chips and programmers.

@viktoreidrien7110 Жыл бұрын

amazing man, use the supercluster to build a RISC-V computer!!!!

@Bianchi77 Жыл бұрын

Nice video, thanks for sharing :)

@birdybirdy688 9 ай бұрын

wow, this is cool!

@shanebekker Жыл бұрын

That new hot plate, was that normal solder paste and is it necessary to have a heating profile?

@zubrkabbi Жыл бұрын

Love it!

@marcus_w0 Жыл бұрын

Wow! Over 3000 Likes on a video on such a small video - you're (seriously) going viral. This video must perform very good.

@thewhitefalcon8539 Жыл бұрын

You have to put all the LEDs for the big board at the front of the board, and then you can stack them vertically in a small rack and have das blinkenlights

@brilianto98 Жыл бұрын

it can be good "peripheral" if used as parallel computation for simple Neural Network with Low Power consumption

@Felenari Жыл бұрын

Good watch ty.

@himselfe Жыл бұрын

This would be perfect for running a custom Forth on.

@phillipneal8194 7 ай бұрын

Excellent ! Very original. Can you invert a matrix on that cluster ?

@Serhii_Volchetskyi Жыл бұрын

Try to use I3C next time. I heard about that protocol, and it would be nice to see it alive. It would be nice to see you making some software for such a cluster.

@orcofnbu 11 ай бұрын

this is the real life mad scientist

@jakubhusak1624 Жыл бұрын

I have programmed 10 atmega circuits at once in parallel (it was tough to program 500-1000 circuits, but in parallell there was 10 times faster!).The ISP protocol worked well and no issues. Sometimes one or two chips did not get programmed because of some malfunction, but the rest was OK. The code had internal integrity check, so I have had instant info that programming process went OK.

@big0bad0brad Жыл бұрын

Beware in general that it's possible to program flash memory "just barely" or "all the way" and the difference doesn't manifest until some time later as the bits start to fade out. I'm not sure if this could have happened in your case but it's something to be aware of.

@NotSpllit1 Жыл бұрын

great vid :D

@allcrafter3747 Жыл бұрын

I have no idea of this but I would suggest running Homeassistent on it for ultra low power consumption

@forsakenrider Жыл бұрын

holy heck!!! awesome!!!

@gegerio 25 күн бұрын

Great , thanks a lot , its was very funny watch

@mortezamoradi3514 Жыл бұрын

Good job

@blechtic Жыл бұрын

That's cool. I think any cluster is going to be memory and memory bandwidth limited, though. Data transfers are going to dominate there, so you'd maybe need memory banks accessible by the master and at least one of the slaves each and only use the common IO lines for synchronization and signalling (and programming). That is, if you want to take advantage of the processing power available rather than just the parallelism.

@satibel Жыл бұрын

that would need a board revision, but a neat thing would be a 2-4 lane memory bus. though depending on what you do, you may be compute limited because those are only 48Mhz processors, so not extremely fast, and they have their own local ram so you might be able to do quite a lot in parallel only. also depending how they are linked, they actually can do DMA via I2C/SPI so that might not be a problem.

@spacenomad5484 10 ай бұрын

Multithreading here we go!

@PlatimaTinkers 9 ай бұрын

What is that solder paste you're using @6:01? Sorry if it's a noob question!

@MkmeOrg Жыл бұрын

Very coooooool!

@yousiftareq8694 Жыл бұрын

Make a RSIC-V GPU out of it!

@BRUXXUS Жыл бұрын

This would be bonkers! I love it!

@khimbittle7705 Жыл бұрын

great video

@anitiyon Жыл бұрын

I'm new to cpu architectures in general but if you could program a terminal in there with custom commands (like "alias" for linux) that'd b pretty cool

@petercarter9034 8 ай бұрын

You are a clever guy

@straightup7up Жыл бұрын

Got skillz, son!

@osmanozturk8838 Жыл бұрын

Thanks

@cosmicaug Жыл бұрын

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

@KA4UPW 8 ай бұрын

Keep the solder paste in the freezer to make it more viscous

@ShrKhAan Жыл бұрын

you should obviously do some logical mux on that bus, or sacrifice the master as a bigger mux and logical coordinator, that would bring a base and operational understanding of computing.