The Dabao Book

*Currently on discount for launch week! Use code LAUNCHWEEK at checkout for $10 off through 12 August!*



The Baochip-1x is fully documented in pieces, this book is the path that connects them and will save you weekends, days and weeks of head scratching.

This book is 21 chapters on register level bare metal C and internals for the Baochip-1x and Dabao, the examples you'll work through, and quirks were measured on real hardware. Even if you're working in Rust, Zig, Forth, Python or C++ instead, you still need to know what the silicon does, and that is what this is, I give you the quirks and workarounds I spent months discovering, already found and documented here.

The dc34 badge runs the same SoC so the peripheral, boot, internals and BIO material applies directly!

WHY THIS BOOK EXISTS

I've been working with Baochip a while and the resources are scattered. I took notes while developing the SDK for this chip and it eventually evolved into this field manual. If you're using AI to augment your development on Baochip, you'll learn that there is no training data for this chip. If you ask an AI model about the Baochip-1x it will confidently invent register addresses, because it has nothing to draw on, I tried several while writing this and every one of them made things up! This book is the alternative, because it was tested on real hardware.

WHO IT IS FOR

Anyone with a Dabao board, a Baochip-1x, or anything with a Baochip in it, who wants to work at the register level. It assumes you have used a Pico or an Arduino before. It does not explain what SPI, I2C or UART is. It explains what this chip does with them, and where that differs from what you expect. It does explain what the BIO is though and how to use it.

FORMAT AND UPDATES

PDF, 224 pages, letter size, fully searchable.

Every buyer gets all future revisions of the first edition free. Parts of this book were reverse engineered from RTL and from watching the chip behave when working with it, so corrections are expected and welcome. Send them to armstrongsubero@gmail.com and they get credited.