New dev board: XDev

XCore Project reviews, ideas, videos and proposals.
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Gravis
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New dev board: XDev

Post by Gravis »

I've made a XS1-L1 based dev board called XDev and I started it as a Kickstarter project.

Check it out and see if it's something you like. Suggestions are welcome.

XDev on Kickstarter


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TonyD
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Post by TonyD »

Looks a great little board, I've made my pledge for one.
ozel
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Post by ozel »

great, that is exactly the price and feature range where I'd like to see a small xmos board.
I will pledge for one. (as soon as amazon payments works here again)

Is it modeled after the XJTAG, using an USB phy or are you using an USB/serial FTDI chip?
How will you solve the chicken/egg problem without requiring an external JTAG programmer? A simple bootloader in the OTP?

However, I'd strongly suggest to go for an L2 or SU1. With the first offering even more computational power, it should be easier to win some of the engineer-type Arduino folks. And with the SU-1 in the pipeline, an XS1 + USB chip design won't be very elegant (and probably more expensive) in the future. Maybe Xmos supports you, since your board is not really competing with any of their boards, so they might supply you with SU1 samples. Then you could save the USB chip and get an additional ADC input for free.
I guess having a kickstarter project featuring an Xmos chips inside is a quite good marketing for them anyways.

It will be a tough challenge to win 500+ people in such a small time. Especially since the whole Arduino hype is not really driven by its feature set, but rather buy its proven wide usability and applicability. I've got my fingers crossed, though!
ale500
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Post by ale500 »

The project looks very nice, and so many options...

OT: Now I ask myself when is the SU device going on sale ?... and are they planning a dual-core or quad-core version ?
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ahenshaw
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Post by ahenshaw »

Very nice! Looks like you've put quite a lot of thought into this. I've made my pledge (or will have once the Amazon service starts working again).
MAD
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Post by MAD »

interesting, i notice you said

"Designing hardware is great and all but without the software, it's a paperweight. Many people including myself are fed up with the subpar Arduino IDE (the GUI for writing code). To remedy this, XDev provides an easy to use IDE that makes coding a breeze."

and creating GUI's from scratch etc...

while im a little hesitant given Carl's (amiga OS dev) lack of time to get it out, ill point you to using rebol as another super quick prototyping/final product shell/gfx option now as well, now that its going open source, if your other options are a "breeze" then this is your "hyper Nano breeze" option :)

its probably the best cross platform tiny stand alone GUI maker (and many other things besides limited by your imagination OC) a single script you write that runs on all platforms the tiny rebol view does "do script.r" whether thats local or remote on a wireless connection etc , and potentially perfect compliment to Xcore too.

heres the key Rebol links you probably need to see before actually trying it
starting with the most useful to get started
http://re-bol.com/rebol.html
http://www.rebol.org/st-topic-details.r?tag=//ui

http://www.rebol.com/what-rebol.html
http://www.rebol.com/pre-view.html
and finally http://rebol.com/ as the page has been striped of most interesting data so looks bad
right now, as he gets ready to go the open source route and "rebol view" 2 is your choice for working GUI code right now not the coming R3 as im not sure where view stands as working right now.

anyway given your project is a few months off, check out the rebol code size V utility it gives you, as i said seems well matched to cross platform Xcore projects

given your robotics interest one of Nick's videos will be fun too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?fmt=18&gl= ... gOvhMxZcOM
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ahenshaw
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Post by ahenshaw »

I submitted an "article" for this to Slashdot. Probably won't get picked up, as they don't seem too interested in promoting Kickstarter programs; but, I thought it was worth a try. This project needs some more advertising if it's going to get funded.
MAD
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Post by MAD »

ahenshaw wrote:I submitted an "article" for this to Slashdot. Probably won't get picked up, as they don't seem too interested in promoting Kickstarter programs; but, I thought it was worth a try. This project needs some more advertising if it's going to get funded.
ahenshaw, if your really after seriously advertising this and the other Xcore projects to get a lot more people in here then your wasting your time with slashdot and the main websites that gravitate to the AMD/Intel stories other than encouraging a 2 minute think limited attention span "thats cool" of most readers there.

if your after real longer term advocacy of Xcore then you need to look up the other fringe group's such as the so called "amiga retro scene" guys like "minimig" http://www.minimig.net/viewforum.php?f=7 and its like where they already use FPGA's etc and their fans unable to make their own stuff want to actually buy things like this and play for fun....

also i imagine all the other retro platform people BBC/Archimedes, Sinclair specy/QL, amiga ,ST,Haiku/OpenBeOS users websites etc anything thats off radar and covered here in the past really http://www.osnews.com/ all these are full of advocates and potential users looking to buy anything and anyone's HW and SW that expands their interest really and will auto advocate it if it fills their needs and help fill relevant Kickstarter programs etc, so start with minimig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn4ZzLH6MpE complete with parallax scrolling :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWV6P4sg ... re=related such a shame you cant boot today's machine's this fast and get on with your productivity :)

if anything AMIGA retro fans are your best and loudest potential advocate's as they are (Legion :) ) everywhere in the shadows and many already wanted the original Transputer cards in their machines http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/metacomco.htm
"...What I know of the transputer is that it was demoed at the spring 1988 developer's conference in an off the shelf A2000. The board looked very clean and neat. There was only one hand wired jumper on it, so the project must have been fairly mature. It had a 32bit IMS T-414 or T-800 transputer chip running at 15MHz (10 MIPs), with 2k of on-chip RAM and one to four megabytes of external on-board DRAM. It communicated to other transputers via four on-chip serial links. In a 2000 you could have up to 4 other transputer daughter boards with 4 transputer chips on each. The on chip links could be used to connect to other transputer equipped 2000s to create a Lan without the need for a network controller card. The practical limitation was on the order of 500 transputer chips. The OS they were using was a partially com- pleted version of "Helios". The only thing they could demo was a Dhrystone test. It was very impressive for the time, and not bad even by today's standards. I was really pissed when CBM just dropped development.."
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/im ... acomco.jpg
or knew about them and know of their potential... probably more so than a few people reading these boards in fact meant in a good way OC,
and some even committed the sin :grin: and later got ST's to try and use them etc

actually... after reacquainting myself with that page above, it seems that slightly expanding this and others Xcore Board's to allow that The on chip links could be used to connect to other transputer equipped 2000s to create a Lan without the need for a network controller card. seems like a good idea even today, to connect all the PCB's this may get used in later,so 2or more channels as "one in" "one out" to simply daisy chain etc with some basic functional SW to make it simple for them to load and IPC communicate all of it together "Mirage cloud" style http://www.openmirage.org/

i came to Mirage (seems interesting) following these links like you do if you want interesting concepts to add functionality such as improved IPC for 2013 etc

http://anil.recoil.org/papers/drafts/20 ... draft1.pdf
https://github.com/rigtorp/ipc-bench
http://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid= ... 11&bih=694
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/conferences/re ... paper1.pdf
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/intervi ... peddy.html
and finally the video
http://vimeo.com/16189862
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ahenshaw
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Post by ahenshaw »

I'm very disappointed that you didn't make your goal. I wish I could have done more. Any thoughts about possibly proceeding with some of the design?
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ahenshaw
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Post by ahenshaw »

Sorry about that. Meant for that to be a reply to XDev thread.
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