Cubieboards now taking orders for 3rd production run.

LoopyByteloose

This is yet another Linux board. I won't bother debating pro and con. Shop until you drop.

http://www.indiegogo.com/cubieboard

LoopyByteloose

Nobody is interested? These boards include IR reception for an IR remote control and a SATA interface for a hard disk. That makes them very easy to adapt to a digital jukebox arrangement or to have a video library of all your old DVDs.

Or, just use the IR remote to control a rather sophisticated robot.

Leon

Nice board, but I don't have a use for it. The BeagleBone I have uses a similar ARM chip and is better for the sort of stuff I'm interested in.

LoopyByteloose

@Leon
I certainly can understand -- We have BeagleBoards, PandaBoards, BeagleBones, Raspberry Pis, Parallela, and so on. I just decided to wait for this one for myself as it suits me well for a Linux environment.

Heater.

Nice looking board. Can't support it though, that crazy Parallela thing has sucked up all my "venture capital" for the next five years. I have Raspi's to contend with and the "research" budget is earmarked for the Prop II

LoopyByteloose

I missed out on the Parallela, though I tried to snag one. Sometimes the web gets very wierd when you live in Taiwan and just won't let you do what you want -- I fear 'big brother' China may be readying to manage Taiwan behind the Great Firewall. You may not hear from me then ;-)

Though I really did want a Parallela, I have not idea what I would need one for - aside from bragging rights. So I guess I will just have to spend my mad money of the Propeller II and try to use Forth on it.

The truth is that I've yet to see what I need all 8 cogs for. Even with VGA and a keyboard and a mouse, the Propeller pretty much has room to spare.

In sum, I just cannot keep up with everyone else. So I am happy to putter along and try to enthuse new users.

Heater.

One of the first products I ever worked on was built using parallel processing. Get this, a bunch of Intel 8085 micros, some interfaceing to high speed real world stuff, some taking care of the user inteface and networking, some even sharing memory like Propeller COGs.
Since then many embedded systems I have worked on required multiple processors to get the job done.
When the Transputer came out I was very interested as I coud see that all that multi-processor stuff we had been doing would be much easier with the parallel model of the Occam language and the Transputer.
Then we get things like the Propeller and XMOS chips, wonderfull.

The Parallela is a bit different as it is designed as a floating point number cruncher. Quite what I would do with it apart from tinker with the Mandlebrot set I'm not sure. But "parallel" has always made my ears prick up:)

Leon

I was one of the first people to develop stuff with the Transputer (modules and motherboards), and sold a lot of boards to educational and research establishments via my distributor. Transtech Devices. My best seller was a 16-module motherboard which could take 16 of my T800/T414 modules, each with 1 MB of RAM, and Transtech put three of them in a large case with a massive PS. The motherboard had two C004 link switch devices, enabling all sorts of interesting configurations to be used, like hypercubes and systolic arrays, which could be switched on the fly. I never did find out what some of my customers, which included RARDE, RSRE and GCHQ, were doing with them.

Inmos wasn't interested in selling modules (although one of their people had designed one) until they saw how well mine were doing, and then developed their own range. My market then dried up.

I later got a job at BAe Military Aircraft Divn. I went to see the head of computing research for a chat, and he pulled one of my motherboards and 16 modules out of a cupboard! I was also shown one that he'd acquired by a lecturer at York University, when I went to see him about registering for a PhD.