Pine64 PineCone BL602

Overview

The Pine64 PineCone BL602 is a compact evaluation board built around the Bouffalo Lab BL602 RISC-V SoC, designed as part of Pine64's "Nutcracker Challenge" to achieve fully open-source WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity on RISC-V hardware. The board measures just 25.4mm × 44mm and integrates the BL602 via a PineNut 12S stamp module, providing WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0 in a breadboard-friendly form factor.

The BL602 SoC features a 32-bit RISC-V core (SiFive E24) clocked at up to 192MHz, with 276KB SRAM, 128KB ROM, and 2MB of onboard flash. All 16 GPIO pins are fully multiplexable — any pin can be assigned to UART, SPI, I2C, PWM, ADC, or JTAG via software configuration. The board includes a CH340 USB-to-serial bridge for easy programming through USB-C, an onboard tri-color RGB LED connected to GPIO11/14/17, and a dedicated JTAG header for hardware debugging.

The PineCone enjoys strong community support with multiple firmware options including the official BL IoT SDK (FreeRTOS-based), Apache NuttX RTOS, Arduino via Pine64's ArduinoCore-bouffalo, embedded Rust through Sipeed's bl602-hal, and OpenBeken for smart home integration. The board's extremely low price point and open hardware design make it an accessible entry point for RISC-V embedded development, IoT prototyping, and wireless sensor network projects.