Parallella Community

Hi,
How about one or many breakoutboards?
I would like to have at least the JTAG on a breakout.
Maybe others want to have access to the Parallella pins for some projects, too, without directly soldering to Parallella.
br,
ESI

Yes I am designing a breakout board too 0.1 Inch headers, if anyone has anything specific or further ideas they would like to express around the breakout board features please add to this thread as I would love to know what folks would like on it.

regards
Al

I'm envisioning 2 different kinds of breakout boards with the 0.1 inch header spacing.

One would have the Samtec connector facing "up" and 2 single-rows of male header pins sticking "down", at the appropriate spacing for attachment to a breadboard.

Another would have both the Samtec connector and headers (probably female, double-row) on the same side of the board, for projects not using a breadboard. Maybe a couple of sub-variants here, one minimalistic, i.e. one Samtec connector and one double-row of headers, and another multiple Samtec connectors and double-headers on two sides (or even 3 or 4 sides) of the main board.

One model to follow would be the "Stick-It" adapter board allowing Paipilio-style "wings" and PMOD devices to be connected easily to Xess.com XuLA FPGA dev board.

I've just sent a breakout board to fab and after having to route it, I can tell you that properly breaking out that much GPIOs while respecting the differential pairs and length matching (ok, I went a bit overboard on that last one), is not trivial.

If you want to spread power and GND properly this takes a lot of pins and those .1 inch header are not small, especially when you need like 80 of them :p

@9600: Here it is http://i.imgur.com/kU0YhYy.png

For a break-out board I'd like to see most of the 'slow' I/O brought out into a nice format (0.1" being the obvious one).

Most vital is JTAG (why that's buried in an obscure high speed connector is about the only bit of the design I can't quite figure out :-/)
I2C would be nice for debugging and hooking up some little devices
SPDIF for providing basic audio without using the complexity of HDMI packet encoding in the PL
And then a hand full of GPIOs

I'm wanting to use mine in a bare-metal situation, and tbh assumed the JTAG would be easily connectible, only just noticed that's is basically SMD only accessible So a nice JTAG breakout board will likely be the difference between using and not using ( I'd like to make my own break out board if one doesn't appear but that's not something I've ever done so ... )

I'd like to see some fast I/O broken out on convenient connectors as well, SATA connectors for instance.