XC-1

Technical discussions related to any XMOS development kit or reference design. Eg XK-1A, sliceKIT, etc.
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MFlamer
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XC-1

Post by MFlamer »

I'm interested in hacking on one of these chips in assembly. A friend gave me an old XC-1 board. Looks like these are depreciated. Is the hardware still relevant, or should I get a newer board? Thanks.

(I accidently also posted this in Q&A)


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Bianco
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Post by Bianco »

The XC-1 and XC-1A are still very relevant, they are the most powerful boards released by XMOS! having 2 to 4 times the processing power of most other boards. The boards might not being production anymore but the tools support is there and developing software for these boards is not any different compared to the newer boards. I do hope you have a XC-1A, because the XC-1 cannot standalone boot because there is no SPI flash to boot from (it needs to be connected to the host computer with USB).

Best boards ever! enjoy it :)
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infiniteimprobability
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Post by infiniteimprobability »

Bianco is right - still supported in the tools and, looking at our roadmap, will continue to be. The XK-1A is relatively low power, physically quite small and very suitable for embedding into projects/prototypes as it provides a useful amount of I/O on headers.

XK-1A also has xScope enabled too - very handy for debugging in system at a high level (gives you the ability to do very low intrusive printing and also set probes to view variables in your code graphically in real time or offline..). A very addictive/powerful debug feature which many would not be without!]


[EDIT] - OOPS! My mistake - got confused between between XK-1A and XC-1A!


With regard to the original question:

Code: Select all

Is the hardware still relevant, or should I get a newer board? 
The XC-1A (G4 based using FTDI) is still supported by the tools but the G4 in general is not recommended for new designs. I wouldn't recommend buying one either (if you can still source them as no more stock is being built) - there are more up to date boards like slicekit.

The XC-1A board is supported by 13.2 tools so you can compile build and debug stuff fine although you will miss out on the xScope feature that I raved about before. Any code you write for XC-1A will be highly portable to other XMOS devices (obviously acknowledging resource count differences such as clock speed differences, core count etc.) but when think about your own hardware, definitely go with a newer device.
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