Getting started with the Baochip

The Baochip is a new RISC-V microcontroller by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, comparable to the Raspberry Pi RP2350. It's a SoC (System-on-Chip) with 2 MiB SRAM, 4 MiB RRAM and with the evaluation board priced at $9.50. What makes it special is that everything down to the silicon is mostly open source. It also comes in a package that, when you shine infrared light at it (at just the right angle) under a microscope, you're able to view the pattern of logic on the die itself! The Baochip has a VexRiscv CPU running at 350 MHz, with an MMU (Memory Management Unit). That's quite unusual for a microcontroller, and it means it can boot Linux! It also has the BIO (Bao I/O co-processor), a cluster of four smaller RISC-V CPUs running at 700 MHz. They're kind of like Raspberry Pi's PIOs, but then actually open source. I just got my Dabao evaluation boards (Baochip dev boards) a couple of days ago. Bunnie has shared a set of Getting Started slides that are helpful, but missing what I thought were key…