Bouffalo Labs BL602 is a low-cost, low-power RISC-V microcontroller that offers 2.4 GHz WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 LE connectivity for IoT projects for about the price of ESP8266. We first discovered it last year, together with a development board.
Pine64 created its own PineCone board fitted with the $2 PineNut module, and some reverse-engineering work has started on BL602 SDK. But there’s now another smaller BL602 module with “Machine Intelligence” (that’s the company name) BL-63B that sells for $1.5 on Taobao in China, as well as on LCSC Electronics albeit you’d need to purchase 1000 pieces to get that price, and single-unit pricing is currently $2.5.
BL-63B WiFI & BLE module specifications:
- SoC – Bouffalo Labs BL602 32-bit RISC-V processor @ up to 192 Mhz with 276KB RAM, 128KB ROM, 1Kbit eFuse, WiFi and BLE
- Storage – 2MB flash
- Wireless
- 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFI 4 1×1 SISO up to 65 Mbps (802.11n) or 26 Mbps (802.11g)
- Bluetooth LE 5.0
- PCB antenna
- 11 pads and through holes with
- Up to 5x GPIO, UART, ADC, DAC, PWM, I2C, SPI, IR
- Reset
- 3.3V and GND
- Additional test pads for GND (2x), IO8 and IO5
- Supply Voltage – 3.0 to 3.6V
- Dimensions – 17.3 x 15 x 3mm (DIP-11)
- Temperature Range – -30°C to +85°C
- FCC ID – 2AVTT-BL63B (But it does not show up on the FCC website yet)
There are also reference to TYWE2S with BL-63B module. TYWE2S appears to both be a module form factor and an “RTOS platform that integrates all function libraries of the Wi-Fi MAC and TCP/IP protocols”, and is also used on Tuya‘s ESP8285 module, so BL-63B BL602 module might just be a drop-in replacement with the same pinout and firmware.
Via Lup Yuen Lee (MisterTechBlog)
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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oooh, shiny!
I want one (or 10!)
This may be a physical drop-in for the BL-8285 but it cannot accept firmware from BL-8285 as this is a 32-bit RISC-V-based MCU and the BL-8265 uses an Tensilica L106 32-bit Extensa ISA RISC core.
The price is right. My buddy Allen will probably buy some of these for his various home wireless projects. If this had a few more pins broken out it would be superior to the RP2048. If the core has the same performance as the ESP-8285 then there should be about 80% of the core’s performance available for application use.
One thing that they really did right with this module is that they used a pluggable pcb edge connector instead of those lousy castellated holes (or other solder-only options) that most other modules have and that require the module to be soldered down onto the application board… or to a carrier board, which is equally lousy and just shifts the problem.
With an edge connector, you can use a small wireless module as an optional addon card for Bluetooth and/or wifi…
AND: it has the huge advantage that you can keep your different application boards clear of any wireless stuff that require expensive qualification/certification (be it regulatory/FCC/etc, Bluetooth/SIG or other), IDs or other expensive beaurocratic costs/overhead in order to be sold… which is no problem to amortize on high volume products, but for low volumes it makes a huge difference.
I wish that edge connectors became the norm for cheap Bluetooth/Wifi modules. What would be even better of course is if there was an open standard for the pinout, so as to be able to use different wireless modules without having to change the design of the application board.
edit: all of that is of course totally independent of the other factors, e.g. how good the Bluetooth/wireless chip is (?) or whether the SDK is really usable (?)