From Hackaday:
The computing power inside a quadcopter is enough to read a few gyros and accelerometers, do some math, and figure out how much power to send to the motors. What if a quadcopter had immensely more computing power, and enough peripherals to do something cool? That’s what Phenox has done with a micro quad that is able to run Linux.
Phenox looks like any other micro quad, but under the hood things get a lot more interesting. Instead of the usual microcontroller-based control system, the Phenox features a ZINQ-7000 System on Chip, featuring an ARM core with an FPGA and a little bit of DDR3 memory. This allows the quad to run Linux, made even more interesting by the addition of two cameras (one forward facing, one down facing), a microphone, an IMU, and a range sensor. Basically, if you want a robotic pet that can hover, you wouldn’t do bad by starting with a Phenox.
The folks behind Phenox are putting up a Kickstarter tomorrow. No word on how much a base Phenox will run you, but it’ll probably be a little bit more than the cheap quads you can pick up from the usual Chinese retailers.
Comments
The zynq chip has an arm processor that runs the OS and the fpga fabric can be used for openCV and such. Exiting times, this could perhaps be used as a basis for a parallella-based flight controller!
$750 is the news... considering the old Kestrel/Procerus used an FPGA and was in the thousands (and still is under LoMa).
Debian has a RT patch to xeonmai, I have one for Angstrom, hence being Ubuntu (high level debian): I doubt it--hence the FPGA.
kickstarter page
@Chris,
Phenox Lab beat you to it in a previous blog post: Link
Regards,
TCIII Admin