elks VS bouffalo_sdk

ELKS supported MMU-less operation on 8088 and 80286 machines, but I don't think an ARM port exists: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks

Roughly in the mid-90s I bought at a local surplus store a "Carry 1" industrial 8088 computer which to my surprise I later discovered it could run Linux (ELKS: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks). I ultimately sold it on Ebay because although it was a beautiful piece of old tech, I was struggling to find more space for other things.

Here's one. I had only the central unit, mine had two floppy drives.

I don't think you can replace the OS on these. Unless there is a way to boot them from DOS, but you are looking at 8c086 machine so the choice is limited. Linux or BSD won't work. But ELKS might if it can be made to boot from DOS. Minix 2.02 seems to work.

Yet ELKS works on 16 bit computers with 640k of RAM.

Some small size Linux-like OSes do exist though: one commenter suggested Lunix (which I didn't know, thanks for the link), and a slightly bigger one is ELKS which runs on old MMU-less x86 CPUs. I managed to run it on a 8088 industrial PC ages ago.

https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

I should have a Furby buried somewhere; now that I think of it, it may be the right platform to stick a bigger brain into, make it wireless so that it could be connected to the home IoT network then signal events or alerts.

I bought a bunch of the 16Mbit flash variant for an embedded project but sadly it looks like the firmware always gets corrupted on write, and have gotten no reply from Bouffalo

https://github.com/bouffalolab/bouffalo_sdk/issues/92

I tried looking through the source code of the SDK to get somewhat of an understanding, but it's taking too long for me to understand, so I'll leave it in your hands. gpio.h gpio.c gpio_reg.h

BouffaloLab has recently started bringing order to the chaos. They have created a new bouffalo_sdk where they're merging bl_mcu_sdk and bl_iot_sdk, the latter being the one to use for wireless. The README file lists which peripherals are currently supported. There's still work to be done, but it's good news they engaged into this endeavour.

The chip has complete-ish sdk here(https://github.com/bouffalolab/bouffalo_sdk) we use as "documentation". Datasheet and the reference manual are incomplete.

I don't think there is a "common solution". From my point of view, the Bouffalo Labs chipsets are not yet widely in use, at least not outside of china. However - as far as I can see, the USB host example code from the SDK interfaces the USB HID parts of the stack, too: https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_mcu_sdk/blob/master/examples/peripherals/usbhost/usb_host.c

I just scoured the current main branch of https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_mcu_sdk and can see the current HAL supports DMA, EMAC, flash, GPIO, MJPEG, PWM, RTC, encryption, timers, UART and USB. DAC and ADC's (audio) are implemented but not tested. I can also see there are BSPs for the LP core if you wanted to take advantage of it, with helloworld examples for all three, and finally there are some examples of using TensorFlowLite in the examples directory that you could build and try too.

Wifi/RF on bl616 is the same state as bl808. We are waiting for bouffalo to release support for it in bl_mcu_sdk: https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_mcu_sdk/issues/85