blog.hackster.io, Sept. 04, 2019 –
GigaDevice has been busy pushing their RISC-V GD32V MCUs capable of surpassing Arm's Cortex-M3 in both power and performance. While there are a pair of development boards and starter kits that use the GD32V, they're not exactly easy to get a hold of unless you can read Chinese, as they are listed on Tmall's website and Google Translate sorely lacks in this area. There is good news, though, as Shenzhen-based Sipeed has released a development board that uses the GD32V MCU and has it listed on Seeed for a mere $4.90.
On the hardware end, the Longan Nano is built around GigaDevice's GD32VF103CBT6 32-bit RISC-V (rv32imac) microcontroller with 32Kb of SRAM, 128Kb of Flash, and micro SD slot for extra storage. It also packs a 0.96-inch 160×80 IPS RGB LCD display (connected via SPI), USB Type-C port for power and programming, four general-purpose 16-bit timer, two basic 16-bit timer, an advanced 16-bit timer, and an 8MHz passive high-speed crystal +32.768KHz low-speed RTC crystal. Expansion features include a pair of 16 through-hole headers with 3x USART, 2x I2C, 3x SPI, 2x I2S, 2x CAN, 1x USBFS (OTG), 2x ADC (10 channel), and 2x DAC.