Recently bought a RED-V ( DEV-15594) and due to several issues, it is essentially unusable. Did I receive a dud, or do others have similar issues?
First of all, when I hit the ‘reset’ button, it doesn’t just reset the RISC-V CPU, but it also seems to reset the SEGGER interface on the ARM chip. This causes the USB connection to drop, so the virtual com port to the device gets lots. It returns a few seconds later, and I’m also greeted with the message that a removable storage device was found (again). According to the schematic, the reset button should only affect the RISC-V CPU, not the SEGGER hardware/firmware that is supervising it.
The USB link also drops when I manage to crash the FE310 (real easy when you’re writing assembly). It’s not very useful to have a debug connection that fails when you are trying to debug things.
The way I’m using the kit is through the SEGGER J-Link software, and the risc-v version of gdb as a ‘remote target’ to write to registers or the ITIM ram, to execute small assembly programs.
The frequent USB link resets unfortunately also often cause a kernel issue on my development machine (Ubuntu 20.04), leading to unstable behaviour and even crashes. Often, the OS stops being able to write to the filesystem, and this can of course cause serious data loss for any application that you have open.