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!
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UnmannedTechShop, not to nitpick but you did not purchase anything but pledged for the possibility of receiving the product if the concept works out. This is a very important thing to understand about kickstarter. But since most people fail to understand this concept, the kickstarter site had to severely limit the type of projects that are allowed on the site. As a result most project are now 99% done before they even turn up on kickstarter,. And it has become more about sponsoring mass production of more or less finished products, then actual exploration of new ideas. Sorry didn't mean to jump you specifically, but the issue has been bugging me for some time.. :)
And back on topic, the Parallella is of course on my pledge list. Very exiting stuff that will fit nicely together with the Ocolus Rift and future projects. :)
It is something that is defiantly very cool, actually purchased on on the kickstarter a couple months ago!
Love it, might be just what I'm looking for.
Will definitely be checking it out.
Great to see that there are other backers here!
@Hugo Vincent: Sorry, I fixed that! Yes, I'm also thinking about it more as a GPU or rather, a special form of coprocessor. But what I think makes it interesting for robotics is that it is highly suited for computer vision processing.
"But what's really exciting about the parallella is its epiphany 16-core or 64-core (there are two models) parallell arm processor."
FYI, the Epiphany is not an ARM processor. The Parallella (I'm also a Kickstarter backer) has 2 ARM Cortex A9 cores in the Zynq chip, and 16 or 64 small, proprietary Epiphany cores more similar to DSP or MCU cores than to ARMs. The memory configuration of these Epiphany cores, their interconnects, and the lack of MMUs means you can't run Linux or really any existing software directly on the Epiphany cores, so it's best to think of the Epiphany more like a GPU - if you optimise your code for it using special tools and techniques (like OpenCL), it'll be fast, but it won't magically make anything faster.
I funded this one too.
@Jesper: I think they are delivering this June/July.
Definitely very interesting - big question is - when can we expect delivery?
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