RISC-V computing at home


It came to my attention recently that you can order a little RISC-V computer for about $10, depending on where you get it. The Milk-v Duo runs linux and has networking capabilities, It has a 1GHz processor, and a 700Mhz processor, although I can only use the 1Ghz processor for the Linux system. My version has 64MB of RAM which is more than enough to do some computing.


The Milk-v Duo SBC

As you can see the computer is very tiny, it has no Wi-Fi chip included but you can start an ssh connection over USB to begin computing with the device. The offical system image comes with a few important programs, including busybox, and python, so there's a lot that I'm sure you can think of doing with this little computer.


Screenshot of python code for milkv

I wanted to run some tests so I wrote this little script to calculate prime numbers. There are probably more efficient ways to do this that were thought of ~2000 years ago by a Greek guy, but this will do for my purposes.


Screenshot of the code running on the milkv duo

Here the code is working just fine, I have it looking for prime numbers over 1,000,000. I'll keep this running until it finds the 52nd Mersenne prime and I can let the fellows over at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) know. Then, once I've collected my $3000 reward from them for finding that prime, I'll be able to retire comfortably. Huge thanks to RISC-V computing on the Milk-v Duo for helping me with this.


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