Ai-Thinker Launches Low-Cost Ai-M62-12F-Kit with Wi-Fi 6, BLE 5.3, and Thread on a RISC-V Core
Built to the NodeMCU format, this new RISC-V board includes everything you'd need to start building Matter-compatible projects.
Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) specialist Ai-Thinker has launched a new RISC-V development board, an entry in the every-growing NodeMCU range, which offers Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE) capabilities, and Thread capabilities — for a little over $5 per unit.
"The Ai-M62-12F-Kit is a development board designed for the Ai-M62-12F module," the company writes of its latest creation, "a Wi-Fi 6 and BLE 5.3 module developed by Shenzhen Ai-Thinker Technology Co. Ltd. The module is equipped with [a Bouffalo Lab] BL616 chip as the core processor, supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n/ax protocol and BLE protocol, and supports Thread protocol."
Designed with low-power edge workloads firmly in mind, the Ai-M62-12F module, brought to our attention by CNX Software, hosts the Bouffalo Lab BL616 system-on-chip with a single-core 32-bit RISC-V processor running at 320MHz — though while the part includes floating-point acceleration and digital signal processing (DSP) hardware, it lacks the RISC-V vector extensions which would improve performance for deep learning workloads. The chip includes 532kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 4MB of flash with execute-in-place (XiP) support.
ELsewhere on the module is the radio block, supporting single-band 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE), and Thread — the latter giving it capabilities which could be of interest for those developing home automation systems based around the Matter standard. There's a security subsystem with AES, RSA, and SHA acceleration, a true random-number generator (TRNG), and support for memory encryption. There's also a 10/100 Ethernet PHY, though this is not broken out to a physical RJ45 socket on the carrier board.
Speaking of the carrier board, it's another entry in the company's NodeMCU range — meaning it includes twin 0.1" (2.54mm) pin headers at either side, providing breadboard-compatible access to the module's various general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins including an SD/MMC controller, I2C, SPI, UART, and I2S buses, analog inputs, and pulse-width modulation (PWM) support. The board includes a USB Type-C port for power and data, and includes an on-board user-addressable RGB LED and two single-color LEDs besides.
The Ai-M62-12F board is now available on AliExpress at $5.20 plus shipping, making it an extremely cost-effective way to get into Wi-Fi 6 and Thread/Matter development on a RISC-V microcontroller.