Olimex's One-Euro RVPC Single-Board Computer Goes Up for Sale Next Week
Selling for just €1 (a little over a dollar), this solder-it-yourself SBC can drive a display at 800×600 and even play games.
Bulgarian open hardware specialist Olimex is gearing up to launch a RISC-V single-board computer that will cost around one dollar at retail — and while it's basic, it's enough to deliver a programmable environment good for some vintage-style gaming.
"The challenge was to create the lowest cost working computer with VGA display, PS/2 keyboard and audio buzzer, which to allow learning [the] RISC-V instruction set on real hardware with [Steve Wozniak's] WozMon style monitor," Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov explains. "The goal set was the RVPC soldering kit for $1 to be ready for Open Fest, the biggest open source technology event in Bulgaria."
Usunov teased the RVPC back in May, having been inspired to attempt a working single-board computer that could be sold for just €1 (around $1.11) during TuxCon 2024. "I made a lightning talk about it," Usunov wrote at the time. "Then after the event I thought some more and decided to use SO8 package and to drop the SD card which would take too much resources."
The finished design is based on the WCH Electronics CH32V003, a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller chip which costs as little as $0.10 in hand-solderable SO8 package. There's a connector for a VGA monitor as an output, and one for a PS/2 keyboard as an input — and very little else.
"The software was the real challenge," Usunov explains. "More than 20 RVPCs were sent to potential developers which expressed interest to participate with the development, but this task was close to impossible and one by one they gave up. Our own first attempt at Olimex using bit bang allowed us to display only 25×25 pixels."
"Curtis Whitley was one of the few who didn’t give up," Usunov continues, "and was [able to] keep trying different approaches. After months of hard work he got [a] result: the impossible job done. The CH32V003 successfully displays VGA with 800×600 pixels resolution ([a miracle] of its own as CH32V003 have only 2k of RAM) and even [a] small game, The Towers of Hanoi, was written for it!"
Olimex plans to give out RVPC kits ahead of a soldering workshop at Open Fest in Bulgaria on November 2nd-3rd; those not attending, or not blessed with the patience to wait, will be able to buy the kits on the Olimex web shop for just €1 (around $1.11) next week.