At Embedded World 2025, we had the chance to work with a board Pierre Dubouilh (one of our lead embedded engineers) has been eager to explore — DeepComputing’s latest RISC-V 64 development board. It’s an exciting platform, and this project marked our first step in bringing Thistle Technologies’ OTA update system to the RISC-V ecosystem.
The board itself is designed to be Framework-compatible, which allowed us to easily integrate it into a Cooler Master external case. Powered by the StarFive JH7110 — a 64-bit quad-core processor with SiFive U74 cores at 1.5 GHz — and running Ubuntu 24.04 out of the box, it offered a solid foundation for our integration work.
Initially, we explored building our Rust-based update system for the board. As expected with newer architectures, we ran into some toolchain maturity issues in the Rust ecosystem for RISC-V 64. So, we pivoted to our lightweight C-based OTA client — specifically designed for portability and ideal for this kind of early-stage architecture support.
Once set up with USB-C to Serial and network connectivity, we were able to compile and run the C client smoothly. The process was straightforward, and we quickly verified both local (USB-based) and remote OTA updates over Wi-Fi.
This effort is an exciting milestone for us — not only validating our approach to OTA updates on new architectures, but also paving the way for broader support across emerging platforms like RISC-V. It’s the result of deep technical focus and persistence from our engineering team, and it reflects the kind of foundational work that often happens quietly but enables real progress.
We’re looking forward to continuing this journey, especially as the Rust toolchain matures for RISC-V 64 and we move toward full support in our primary update system.
Stay tuned — and follow Thistle Technologies to see where we go next. We will soon publish step-by-step instructions on our work with this board in our documentation page!
