Hi all,
A few weeks ago, it was announced [1] that the RTL8710 by Realtek could be a decent alternative to the ESP8266. I ordered two RTL8710’s to see what I could do with it (+/- $3.00 each)
Compared to the ESP8266, the RTL8710 is a Cortex M3 running at 80MHz. It contains a bootloader/drivers in the ROM section, and an integrated SPI flash (448KB) for running user code. It has support for WiFi and crypto accelerators. Via JTAG, the chip can be programmed. So far this chip seems to belong to the Ameba family, which is a (Chinese?) IoT platform [2].
There is not much information available, but someone [3] managed to create a very basic bare-metal environment with support for flashing. I used that as a starting point to see if I could get RIOT-OS running [4]. Yes it (somewhat) works, but it is very hacky without vendor headers 