In october I helped fund the parallella one board computer. There are many of those around right now, the raspberry pi, the udoo, beagleboard black, but this one is different, because it mates a super-powerful Xilinx Zynq 7020 application processor, which is a 1 ghz dual core Arm A9 (same as in ipad 2) with a FPGA fabric the size of a medium fpga chip. This makes it a highly flexible processor, one that in itself could surpass most of the ARM based flight controllers on the market right now. The fpga fabric in itself is something that could prove very useful, since it can perform signal processing with a breeze, it comes extremely natural to fpga to do filtering, pid and such real-time processes, with minimal latency.
But what's really exciting about the parallella is its epiphany 16-core or 64-core (there are two models) parallell arm processor. edit: RISC processor. This thing is perfect for computer vision, optical flow, processing point clouds for 3D scanning and on the fly GIS processing. With its super low power requirements it's perfect for battery powered robotics.
But the best part is the price, at only $99 it's something that you can loose in a crash without loosing to much sleep over it!
On the back of the board there are connectors for 48 fpga pins, uarts and more. We now need to make a daughter board with sensor and connectors for servos and ESCs, rx and all the other stuff we need, but I want everyone to chime in and voice their needs for their specific applications, what sensors do you think are the best? I've started a discussion at the parallella forums, with a community effort we can make this something really great!
