XCore Exchange

Because it's christmas soon, here's my wish list:

Would be great to have a minimal XMOS breakout board with XMOS, 1V regulator, flash, reset logic, xtal. Nothing else. Similar to this project: http://www.xcore.com/projects/xs1-l1-64-stamp-breakout.

It's sad that an L1 is about 7 Euro but there's no board for less than 50 Euro AFAIK. (Plus about 50 Euro for the XTAG-2)

Sorry for saying it so directly: LPCXpresso comes with JTAG even and it is cheap => Many of may friends bought such a board and start to play with it.

Do you mean a board just for processing, no IO?

I agree, Xmos should have made such a board as one of there first kits and made it cheep.

Hobbyists love PDIPs and stuff that fits in to a breadboard (i like it too) so there is no messing with SMD if you want to do something on your own. It may also be nice to sell simple plugin modules that contain only the most vital stuff (1V reg,SPI flash...) so people can make there own boards without touching SMD (Quite a lot of people are scared of it)

So yeah Xmos rethink your dev boards a bit.

rp181 wrote:Do you mean a board just for processing, no IO?

Of course with I/O, look at the link I posted. Also the LPCXpresso has some.

Berni: Yes, you got it ;) IMHO hobbyists, schools etc. are a key element for an active community. This leads to a larger public (Open Source) code base and makes the platform more attractive and widely known. I have no problems with SMD, but my project (Easy41) is made to be copied/built by others and I know that many of them don't touch SMD.

I am actually working on such a board with a single core device. I am trying to keep it as small as possible, and it will be mountable like this, board on board:
http://www.vectornav.com/vn-100-introduction
Ile let you know how it goes.

Oh, this looks nice. If you like and if it will be not too expensive, you can reserve 3 prototypes for me. Possibly this could reduce the PCB costs for you.

Then I could think about an alternative design with THT components for my current project, the people with http://www.pkelektronik.com/media/catal ... 201299.jpg will like it :)

What will the board have on it, I assume the usual suspects
Xmos L1-64
Power reg + sequencing 1v, 3.3v
Flash

But what else are you planning :
For instance how do you program it, is there a xtag connector or will you put an 2232D on it ?

regards
Al

IMHO a 3.3V reg isn't needed, the main board needs one anyway, most probably.

I plan on just putting a connector of some sorts (SMT) for the XTag.

Is it possible to have a base board supplying power to several XMOS processors? Or would this introduce problems? if not...

Which do you guys prefer:

1) A slightly larger base board with flash,programming, power,programming ,etc that acts as a master to smaller bare-minimum modules, deriving power from the master. Could possibly put an FTDI on the master so xtag isn't required.

2) Similar to the XK-1, everything can be it's own master. Everything has flash, programming, etc.

both would be able to stack vertically and horizontally (1 dimension).

I only need one single core XMOS currently. Possibly I could also use a dual or quad core later but I don't think that I need several of them. But of course that's just my use case.