snickerdoodle

[dobkeratops]

Could there be any synergy between the so called 'snickerdoodle' platform and the Parallella, the common ground being the zynq FPGA, and the market of robot/IoT projects.

http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/10/07/ ... wdfunding/

does it have connectors that would allow one to combine both boards.. use the parallella for more processing power whilst using the Wifi & camera connections of the other. Perhaps some software (ARM+FPGA) could be similar. Perhaps people buying this board could be targeted for interest in the paralella, or perhaps if the snickerdoodle is successful they could design a V2.0 with an epiphany chip for extra grunt..

[aolofsson]

I doubt it

[piotr5]

I doubt it'll be a success, but if they are, some adapter card between parallella and that board might be in order, especially since they have the better power-supply-compatibility. i.e. pass through eLink north and south, if possible, along with an ultra fast fpga to fpga connection, and receive power for parallella from that other board. then on software side give access to epiphany for the other board and access to wlan and another usb to parallella. my ideas about an e-link adapter for scalability could also be implemented with that other board, I suppose.

and again, also that new board has chances of success if they provide an addon-card specifically for robotics, instead of going the long way around through shield-compatibility. drones for example require minimal weight, so you'd better replace quad-copter-controlling electronics with a zync board and addon-card completely...

[sebraa]

[piotr5]

mainly it's because I found and because andreas pointed out . (obviously in china such people like the one in the audio-thread here in fpga discussion are quite common.) the kind of robot in the first link is small, it fits into a hand. maybe with snickerdoodle you cannot build such a tiny robot, but it isn't much bigger either. also with drones I see the trend towards miniaturization, as long as you can put a camera on it. with a controlling unit for the robot there is a size-problem though. if you're too small you wont fit the batteries for smarter processors, the motors wont manage to lift them. in other words, I see economically an opportunity opening up for small controlling-units which consume little power. i2c/spi are great for sensors and such, cpu is great at triggering actions from sensory input. but fpga has to offer an extremely high bandwidth for communication and the flexibility to plug in stuff which doesn't have i2c/spi. further I noticed gentoo has added a lot of rtos stuff for robotics. so obviously there is some demand for robotics-hardware. with fpga it's possible to have a single chip for many tasks, instead of using one shield per task. all this makes me believe an addon-board implementing lots of typical robotics-duties with the help of fpga in the cpu-chip would fit the current trends. if with minimal effort and weight such board could take care of quad-copters or lineform-robot-modules, that'd be a success story. on the other hand, the market for computation-units is quite saturated, and chip-developers are bad customers for fpga since they only need a single board for their prototypes. I see several trends converging, the desire to build something which could become an economical success, the trend towards modular robotics, the trend for data-acquisition and AI, the customers' wish to have a single device for lots of applications, software-defined radio emerging from that trend too, and a desire for multiple devices connecting together temporarily to form a bigger device with more capabillities and spacial reach. the cummulation-point of all these trends are modular robots which you can connect and disconnect, preferably which can connect to eachother autonomously. so far adjuno is battling on that front, but it's lacking one important component, software-defined communication as is possible through fpga. and the modularity it offers is too big for creating hand-held devices. at least my search didn't come up with anything compact, maybe there already is. either way, more competants are needed in that area, or else we wont seen any useful DIY devices in the spirit of modular robotics...

IMHO the goal should be to push open hardware right in front of what is comercially available, the open hardware movement should offer some innovative stuff which you cannot buy elsewhere. take a bill of materials, some 3d-printer for the static components, and create robots for cheap. there are printable quad-copters. would they be banned nobody could enforce that banning. would they be expensive, poor countries would have them too (by replacing 3d-printers with actual hand-work and good image-processing as an adviser). and the same for any kind of autonomously moving small devices. billions of people are on earth, great opportunity to put them into some constructive use by allowing all of them to contribute to open hardware. the reason why you cannot is that machines are required for some stuff, so let people build those machines!

[sebraa]

[dobkeratops]

[piotr5]

[sebraa]

[piotr5]

lol, you make it sound as if I were talking about a single product I wish to sell, as if I'd written a report for investors about my future company. I suppose I made a big blunder then, because that's not what I were thinking of. it's true I do sound like an unprofessional startup-founder making a highly exaggerated sales-pitch about whatnot my product will do for you. but I wasn't talking about any kind of ready-made drone nor about any kind of supercomputer. I specifically referred to my idea for a robotics-board. it's all about some piece of plastic with metal paths and a few electronic components where you can attach other components and other such boards. if I want my drone to land on over-land power wires to charge up the battery then of course I need a huge and heavy component for magnetically extracting that power. and quite naturally you are right that different tasks require different devices. but my wish is that whatever device you need to have, parallella with the robotics board should provide possibility for fast prototyping. and this includes passing on 500V from one board to the next without burning down so that eventually it arrives at some hardware which does have the required power-supply to handle that. that's the whole idea of modularity! however, as for actually computing anything, or actually moving anywhere, that's supposed to be the problem for the customer. the idea is to sell it in china along with parallella. maybe add some socket where you could somehow plug in a chip harvested from an old hardware. i.e. create a package alike to the raspberry pi tinkering sets but focused on hardware-development and modular robotics. and the customers aren't ordinary people at first, first the hobbyists must be won. then if the hobbyists have some nice ideas, ask them to put it into open hardware and sell some ready-made devices. of course modular isn't energy-efficient, but the individual modules should be!