Tethys is a StarFive VisionFive 2 single board computer with a 1.5GHz StarFive JH7110 64-bit RISC-V processor, 8GB RAM and a 500GB Kingston NV2 NVMe SSD.
The naming
Tethys is the mother of Tyche.
Components
| Article | Price | Where from |
|---|---|---|
| Waveshare VisionFive2 RISC-V | 110.99€ | Amazon.de |
| Kingston SNV2S500G | 27.25€ | Amazon.de |
| YouYeeToo Solid Metal Case | 21.99€ | Amazon.de |
| TOTAL | 160.23€ |
Assembly
Straightforward. You need to bring your own NVMe screw and washer.
Bring up
Extract starfive-jh7110-202306-SD-minimal-desktop.img.bz2 and dump
it on a SD-card. Ensure the boot jumpers are on setting SDIO.
It will boot headless and grab an IP over DHCP.
To boot from NVMe, flash the firmware v3.1.5 (newer v3.4.5 is broken on 8GB model):
# apt install mtd-utils
# flashcp -v u-boot-spl.bin.normal.out /dev/mtd0
# flashcp -v visionfive2_fw_payload.img /dev/mtd1
Then extract and dump starfive-jh7110-202306-nvme-minimal-desktop.img.bz2
on the NVMe. Ensure the boot jumpers are on setting QSPI.
Power supply
If you use a SSD, you need a proper power supply. I get stable runs from a ThinkPad 65W USB-C power supply.
Power usage: I used a measuring USB-C cable from SooPii with a 65W Baseus GaN charger. Normal idle usage is around 3.5W, with all cores active one gets to 4.9W. Adding to that heavy I/O on the NVMe, I can get peaks up to 7.2W, but only for seconds.
I’m now running it on a Raspberry Pi 4 USB charger (9.87€) which claims to do 3A, which runs stable.
Other details
CPU temperature can be read using lm_sensors from 120e0000.tmon-isa-0000.
Building GCC for several hours: CPU 66°C, SSD 53°C, Metal case outside 44°C.