Adding ethernet and FPU to hydra

justin weber

I have an idea I wanted to run by some of the designers on this forum. Is it possible(feasible) to use the onboard serial programming header to add a second propeller chip to the Hydra game console. I want to add Floating Point Coprocessor V3, maybe SPI based ethernet capabilities to the hydra. I plan on using the card expansion for the SD card module. If it is somewhat easy to communicate with another propeller via serial, you could even off-load multiple cogs from the main chip. So basically what I had in mind was devoting one cog to get status information from the other propeller chip. This way you use the FPU, ethernet, or whatever else connected to the extra IO's(time chip, extra eeprom space,etc) on the second prop. Also since I'm here I should ask, is there are way to at least add that FPU chip to the Hydra without my proposed setup(like using the serial programming port directly).

Mike Green

You could use the programming port for serial communications, but I'd recommend using something like the Hydranet connections instead.· If you use the programming port, you'd have to switch between the USB adapter and the co-processor.

Unless you're really set on using a specific floating point coprocessor, why not use the Propeller?· There's a pretty complete floating point library in Spin and assembly and it's probably faster than most floating point coprocessors you might use.
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tpw_man

If you didn't already know, there is a floating point calculations library in the Propellor Tool Library or one in the OBEX here, but I have not used it. You could probably set up a cog to run it. Sorry for the overlapping posts!

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deSilva

Be careful to take Float32 and NOT FloatMath
There had been some dicussions here wrt the FP-Coprocessor you most likely refer to...