Parallella Community

Hi all,

As Fred wrote in his post earlier the Parallella "Porcupine" breakout board is allive and well. We have some fully assembled boards available for free to folks who are doing interesting open-source projects. If you are interested, reply with a a short description of your project and we'll get back to you.

First come first serve!

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi,

I sure would like to experiment with my 7010 board connectors, I have a couple of projects that could use it:

(*) A digitally controlled analog mixer project, where a number of high quality digital volume controls (samples from TI/BurrBrown) are controlled from in this case the Parallella via a fast working Tcl/Tk script. There's a 3 wire serial protocol that I have tested FPGA interface units for, and the point to use a fast connection, unlike a serial interface that I've used in the past, is that sliding a number of sliders requires fast updating, and preferably little delay.

(*) connecting (an)other FPGA board(s) to the power of the parallella, to act as interfaces and "quick to program" test FPGAs (with a USB connection to the Xilinx Impact programmer). I have a Spartan 3E board from Digilent/Xilinx laying around, with a big connector to a breadboard, which also runs a number of digital synthesizer simulations that can be controlled and enhanced with the Parallella.

(*) a number of other things I want to try: connecting a magnetically controlled rotary encoder chip, high quality DA convertor (without the need for usb), digital audio SPDIF, various sample chips I have on various adapter boards waiting for a strong and fast digital interface.

Theo V.

Hi FHuettig,
I'm working on a Research Project at NASA Ames and am really interested in getting one of your breakout boards.
In the project we are flying with a UAV based on the Open-Source Project Ardupilot (http://ardupilot.com/) and want to hook-up a parallela board in order to perform software health management of the autopilot.
If you are interested, feel free to contact me (pm).
Thanks and have a good one ,
Patrick

You had me at "NASA". Are you sure you only need one? Please send an email to support@adapteva.com and we'll get you one (or 2) breakout boards for your UAV project,

I don't have a specific awesome project in mind, but can I buy one (or two ) please? I have two kickstarter 7020s and I am interested in turning them into data acquisition devices for laboratory instrumentation, hopefully I can accelerate things like FFT and DWT in the fabric/epiphany.

I don't need one right now but will do at some point, but I can wait until I can purchase one. The two projects I'm working on are

1) A lightweight 2D Core + maybe a 3D core. The ADI dumb frame buffer core is just silly and huge IMHO, so replacing that is coming along nicely. After that would be nice to have enough acceleration for wayland/DirectFB in a small MIT'ed open source core, so even the BSD guys would get the benefit. With the ticket to ride core now open sourced, it kinda knocked my desire to continue a complete 3D core beyond the personal achievement desire, though implementation using the Epiphanies for the shaders (possible also portions of the texture samplers) would be good.
Coming from a games dev background with articles etc. published on graphics and shaders would be nice to be able to say I've written it from the HDL upto fancy fx personally. Kind of like, they say you should make a CPU once in your life... also would be nice to be able to tell IHV GPU vendors actually I do know how hard it is to make HW do X when I ask for something

2) Porting Sproulls FPGAtools to zynq. Xilinx tools don't work most of the time for me and the crappy partial synthesis issue (its an expensive option, when imho its whats really cool about FPGA) make me want an alternative, Torc and fpgatools show its possible, soon, maybe if someone sits down and puts the work in. I've been hacking / figuring out for a bit and I'm now starting to take little hacks into a working framework. So far the checked in code (on my fork) is mostly re-org of sproulls code (he's been unable to extend his work due to time constraints) but as time allows i'm hoping to generate zynq 7020 bitstreams. https://github.com/DeanoC/fpgatools

Hi,

I would like to buy (or receive) a Porcupine breakout board since I want to create a tutorial project for our computer engineering students. I was thinking about creating a controller for a follow the line robot with proximity detection.

Being able to directly connect sensors and actuators via a breadboard would greatly simplify and speedup this project.

Thanks in advance,
Joost

Thanks, Andreas, Iook forward to working a bit on it. Any time frame I can expect to receive it ?

Theo V.