I have yet to see mention of a "killer app" in this thread. By that I mean something that will sell the millions of chips necessary to pay for the P2's seven-year development and subseuqent manufacture. Despite their potential appeal to a portion fo the hobbyist crowd, retro desktops running BASIC just aren't going to cut it. Someone mentioned PLCs, which might be a nice niche for the P2. But I don't know if it's a million-unit market, since most PLCs are pretty simple affairs that don't require the P2's power. The fact remains that our ability to use the P2 for the cool apps that interest us will depend upon Parallax's ability to market and sell the P2 for volume apps that are far less sexy and fun. This means competing head-to-head with Microchip, Atmel, and Freescale. So the answer to the OP's oiginal question has got to be along the lines of pitching the P2 to the likes automobile and appliance makers -- not to hobbyists.
You know you're a real outcast when you're kinda brainy but even the geeks and nerds reject you.
Don't be fooled. Chief nerd around here is Chip Gracey. I don't think he is going to reject you.When it comes to geeks and nerds, we start with people like Chip and Linus Torvalds. Move down through the ranks of people like the guy who made a binary adder out of wood. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A or a computer out or relays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mFJ7XpY1Q8 and so on.The Arduino types don't even know where to start being nerdy or geeky.
KC_Rob, Yes we agree. No problem with using the minimal appropriate solutions here. And for sure I would probably not employ Linux or similar OS for many small real-time tasks. The only nit pick is the use of the word "bloated". It comes over a a slur implying the code is not well written and unnecessarily slow and big. ...
Well, I certainly didn't mean it that way. Maybe I should have used another term. But one acceptable meaning of "bloated" is simply an excess over what is required or warranted in a particular instance, a rather more neutral connotation, and how I wished it to be understood.
I'm finding the bloated vs bare metal discussion interesting. You know, I think most people want a mix most of the time. Where the constraints warrant it, bare metal makes sense because it has to. Where those aren't so indicative, people want easy, productive, robust, capable.
This is why I particularly like the idea of the helper chip. One can plug it in to the capable 'bloat' and from there, get bare metal stuff done without having to live with the implications of bare metal. A broad range of functions presented easy cheezy would make this a compelling add-on. Buy one, plug it into your Lindromacwin machine and go!
Need to get down and dirty? Author a program, send it down the wire, and enjoy the benefits more directly.
I personally love UNIX. I encounter many people who have trouble with it because they didn't get that core introduction most of us probably did. --That I did. Linux is awesome, as is BSD to name another ecosystem where one can strip it right down to the kernel, single user mode, and some program. It's not all that hard to do either. Bloat it up the other way and make a killer workstation / environment too. Do it all just the way you like it.
People have to know stuff to do that though. For some people, it's a lot of stuff seemingly, and for others, they appear to grok it right away and they are often seen out in the field somewhere doing their thing, getting it done, no worries.
Then again, I love Windows and Mac OS too. Yes, I said it. As long as it's not Windows 8... maybe it's better to say I love Windows 7 and XP both. They ended up reasonable OSes, and they are everywhere. Not sure if I like Android yet. Haven't got a system to hack on, but I will soon.
When people have centered on one OS, they tend to have trouble with others. I think this is true for applications, languages, and all sorts of things. Once they have gone the distance with more than one, they become experienced in that particular art and have a far easier time being flexible. The natural inclination is to not do that because the meta-tasks associated with that generally don't add value to the primary tasks at hand. Or so people think.
The reality is different. Yes, there will be some mucking about, but that doesn't typically endure, leaving somebody with a lot more choices than they had before.
Funny thing about lots of choices though. One must then choose! When there are fewer choices, that work goes away, sending people down a few well trodden paths, leaving them free to other considerations. Those that have the expanded set to work from will easily see where the few choices are not optimal, and they will be right about it, and the few choices people won't really care much because they got it done and are off doing something else they want done.
Making it about the tools in this way does not appeal to everybody, and where there are limits, there is art, right along with "good enough" and maybe that's why the Arduino makes so much sense to the artsy-fartsy crowd. Nothing wrong or bad about that crowd, mind you, it's just different from say, this one, or the many "pro" niches out there.
Then we've got the "need to manage time and head space people", and I'm in that group. When I had the freedom and time to really muck about, I did and I'm glad I did. But, I won't do it today, unless there is a big return because I know I can jump on any old box and go and get it done. Meta tasks are kind of expensive in this way.
Call those people "lean" minded people.
Somewhere in that nexus, P2 lives. Maybe it lives in more than one place. Personally, I think "lean" is an idea that can resonate with the P2. If you aren't about integrating everything, and more about a tool / technology that can get right at a task and complete it, I think a P2 is going to live there easily. P1 is that way, for the set of tasks it rocks on. Sometimes that's hard to see because we've pushed it way beyond where many, if not all of us, really thought it would go.
When considering marketing vs direct application type messaging, basic ideas form foundations that bubble up to the specific application, niche, task messaging, and one of those ideas surrounding the P2, is that a lean type approach can be taken. Say we've got it all done, the thing can be approached with C, SPIN, PASM, whatever else makes sense.
You connect it up, grab the core stuff you want to reuse, ideally author some glue code and then your specific task code, and it does the job, next. And I can do that with a fairly small set of dependencies, or other things I need to know or manage. That's lean. In this context, investing in the chip and it's tools means being able to razor sharp focus on something and do it with few issues and or dependencies. People who identify with that message will pick it up quick and be loyal. How many of them are there? Don't know, but they are there, and P2 will be attractive to them.
You guys have other single, two or few word core ideas like that to put out there? Mine is "lean" If you get started on a P2, you can get a whole lot done "in the box" and the attraction there is simply keeping the focus on the task to complete, not so much the meta-tasks, tools and such. I'm curious to read what you guys think in basic terms like that..
I have yet to see mention of a "killer app" in this thread. By that I mean something that will sell the millions of chips necessary to pay for the P2's seven-year development and subseuqent manufacture. ... Despite their potential appeal to a portion fo the hobbyist crowd, retro desktops running BASIC just aren't going to cut it. Someone mentioned PLCs, which might be a nice niche for the P2. But I don't know if it's a million-unit market, since most PLCs are pretty simple affairs that don't require the P2's power. The fact remains that our ability to use the P2 for the cool apps that interest us will depend upon Parallax's ability to market and sell the P2 for volume apps that are far less sexy and fun. This means competing head-to-head with Microchip, Atmel, and Freescale. So the answer to the OP's oiginal question has got to be along the lines of pitching the P2 to the likes automobile and appliance makers -- not to hobbyists.-Phil
If that's truly the case, then be prepared to get into the gutter on pricing, something I'm not sure Parallax is capable of and/or willing to do. PLCs and the like are perfectly acceptable applications for the Propeller, and sales can be rather decent -- you just need more design wins. Ie, there likely will not be *one* killer app that will put the Propeller over the top but rather many little ones (so maybe not a single killer, just many little maimers. )
If I knew what that next killer app was, I wouldn't be talking about it here until it was ready to roll out, I'd be out raising some venture seed money.
However, I also doubt that a propeller would be part of it. The microcontroller space is too crowded with ARM from $1 to $20 and FPGAs for all ranges as well with far better bit twiddling performance. A few pages ago the FPGA pricing was mentioned, and for the low volume customer, yes even small FPGA parts can be expensive, and that is on purpose. Xilinx/Altera focus on their big customers, the network guys who buy those huge parts but compile network protocols into hardware. And the variety of people that use to do ASICs. In both cases there are a smaller number of these customers but they use 10s if not 100s of thousands of those FPGAs. And when you get into that club you get very aggressive pricing.
So go ahead and dump on me, but beyond the hobbyist community I just don't see a commercial application for the prop. But that hobbyist/education community is a big place, and Parallax had quite a lead there.
OK, rather than bloat, let us call it under-utilized software.
So the answer to the OP's oiginal question has got to be along the lines of pitching the P2 to the likes automobile and appliance makers -- not to hobbyists.
You are depressing me.
I don't see any way the Props are getting into the automobile and appliance markets. Those guys already have a huge array of devices to choose from that already tailored to those applications with prices down in the cents.
Your claim is that hobbyists are not a market. Presumably because it's not such a big market or because that market is already saturated with Arduino's, Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bones and such like.
So there is nowhere to go.
As has been said above, I don't see a "killer app" but rather a lot of varied niches in which the Prop is applicable and the Prop II more so. It has that flexibility to be in many places whilst perhaps not being the optimal solution if you want to make a billion of whatever widget it is.
Failing that Parallax will have to survive on me ordering a couple of devices a year....
Ok, so here's an idea I shared with Chip that I thought was pretty killer:
Remote client/server telepresence device.
The Prop2 would be the client (camera) and a PC would be the server (viewer).
The PC would be an ordinary machine with an Occulus Rift head mounted display.
The P2 would be on a board with 2 VGA cameras that are approximately 4.5 inches apart.
The P2 would take pictures at 30FPS and send a stereo data stream to the PC, which would display these on the HMD in realtime.
The motion sensor feedback from the HMD would be sent to the P2 to control a set of servos that implement a pan & tilt rig which the board is mounted to.
In this fashion you have a remote telepresence device that uses IMU feedback to control the view and gives the end user a stereo 3D view of the remote world.
If you combine this with a wireless protocol, you can mount the board on a variety of platforms, with or without the pan & tilt mechanism.
The Robotics crowd would love it, the hobby crowd would appreciate it, the R/C crowd would be nutso for it, and there are a whole host of makers and tinkerers that would find some unconventional use for it.
The second part of the gig is making a P2 viewer and leverage the video output capabilities. You could use either a large LCD and stand away from it and do the lazy eye 3D effect, or roll your own HMD with a 7" 800x480 display. I know that it's possible to make the P2 do DVI through a TFP410 chip, it would just be a 100% bit-banged display and not rely on buffering from the VID.
Something to think about, the max clock for DVI is 165 Mhz, and 1600x1200 uses a 161Mhz clock, it may be possible to do 1920x1080 at 160Mhz instead of the usual 150Mhz. At 160Mhz you can use the XFR to do DMA to the TFP410 and avoid the bit-banging.
If you want something for the masses, I would suggest something like "12 Blocks" on steroids.
Something very object oriented and event driven. Where you bring in blocks like LCD, VGATEXT, KEYBOARD, MOUSE, etc.
The KEYBOARD object would throw a "keypressed" event and you would have the LCD act on it.
So go ahead and dump on me, but beyond the hobbyist community I just don't see a commercial application for the prop. But that hobbyist/education community is a big place, and Parallax had quite a lead there.
You'll get no dumping from me. I agree that it wouldn't make sense for Parallax to simply throw in the towel on those spaces. My only caution here would be to respect the new realities presented by RPi, BeagleBone, etc.
Nor would I throw in the towel on industrial and scientific applications. As someone said earlier, little of it is "glamorous" and you won't see many (read "almost surely none") million-piece orders, but there is plenty of business to be had and many niches the Prop can possibly fill.
If you want something for the masses, I would suggest something like "12 Blocks" on steroids.
Something very object oriented and event driven. Where you bring in blocks like LCD, VGATEXT, KEYBOARD, MOUSE, etc.
The KEYBOARD object would throw a "keypressed" event and you would have the LCD act on it.
If you want something for the masses, I would suggest something like "12 Blocks" on steroids.
Something very object oriented and event driven. Where you bring in blocks like LCD, VGATEXT, KEYBOARD, MOUSE, etc.
The KEYBOARD object would throw a "keypressed" event and you would have the LCD act on it.
Bean
I do like that notion, but I'd like to see it integrated with something like SimpleIDE -- I even drew some icons for such.
...More than 250 000 Arduino boards have been sold around the world—and that doesn’t include the reams of clones....
Is 250K enough sales for someone manufacturing a micro? Maybe it is. I don't know, but I'm guessing not. And I'm also guessing that Parallax Semiconductor was not founded to tap the likes of the Arduino market, but something rather more vast.
Is 250K enough sales for someone manufacturing a micro? Maybe it is. I don't know, but I'm guessing not. And I'm also guessing that Parallax Semiconductor was not founded to tap the likes of the Arduino market, but something rather more vast.
-Phil
I suspect such low hanging fruit would be very attractive until the product line can penetrate other larger markets.
The DSP market is about $7 billion/year. With a single-cycle multiply, and 8 cores, the P2 might be able to find a niche in that market. Even at 0.1% of the market, the gross revenue would be $7 million/year.
I suspect such low hanging fruit would be very attractive until the product line can penetrate other larger markets.
Maybe so. Hopefully, such an approach can get the P2 into the hands of those who have influence over the larger design wins. OTOH, it could also (unjustifiably) typecast the P2 as a hobbyist chip.
24 million Kinect units have been sold... and they really don't support 3d viewing very well. If you are clever you can make the Kinect pick out the floor and map obstructions... pretty nice.
The Sony Bloggie 3D supports 3d teleconferencing and it can be had for $75(reconditioned). Add servo's, a joystick and a 3D TV on both ends and you are done... pretty nice.
The Prop2 will make a beautiful open source camera controller.
We have cars with stereo cameras in the grill and phones with 3d cameras. Robots need vision... and they need to see in 3D. So, streaming a stereocamera through a Prop2 and have it inspect various bits seems like a very good idea.
If you were to mix the engineering strategy of Kinect type devices with a stereo camera (stereo-photogrammetry), you would have a good job for a Prop2 and a terrific vision system,
and it wouldn't be incredibly hard to do.
The best advertising would be a series of kickstarters that make a bundle of money:)
Selling a million units in a reasonable period of time shouldn't be a problem. Industrial and institutional support will be required, but there is no reason to believe that this won't happen.
Advertising in the usual sense of the word has almost nothing to do with it. Some kinds of marketing won't really be possible until there is full documentation and an installed user base.
There will be a great need for books...and lots of them. If you are currently active on the P2 forum, you should be writing a book.
If Parallax wants to play with the big dogs then they better start making direct comparisons with devices like the SHARC, Sitara, M4 ARMs and other offerings. That means benchmarks(which Parallax avoids like the plague), white papers, real application notes, stop avoiding ESC. In regards to the ARM chips they also have to make the case that their single sourced, proprietary cpu is a better fit, than a ARM chip that a buyer can purchase almost anywhere. And yeah be ready to answer critics why the designer refused to incorporate JTAG.
Though that does make me wonder if the propeller actually is suited for a GC-based language. One cog, running multiple tasks, could be the memory manager: one task to process memory requests from the other cogs, one task to perform garbage collection. Hub ram could be used as a hot cache, while external ram would hold onto the rest. Because the GC would always be running, you wouldn't necessarily encounter the occasional (and unacceptable, in this case) pauses that VMs like Java and CLR encounter. Propeller's lack of interrupts might actually make it an ideal platform for an efficient GC implementation.
I had exactly the same thought when I first discovered the Propeller but I've never had time to try it. Having a realtime garbage collector running on a separate COG might be interesting. I'm a Lisp fan from way back and would have to make a Propeller Lisp that uses that architecture. I suspect the audience for that sort of thing could be counted on one hand though. :-)
The Prop and Arduino combo is nice but basically pointless.
The Prop and ARM combo is great. All the real-time real world interfacing possibilities of the Prop plus all the big time OS, file system, networking, user interface possibilities of Linux.
Plus the fact that you can use all the Prop dev tools on the ARM for a self contained system in the space of a cigarette box.
I want to see a Prop II piggy back board for the Raspi. Do I have to do this myself?:)
The Prop and Arduino combo is nice but basically pointless.
The Prop and ARM combo is great. All the real-time real world interfacing possibilities of the Prop plus all the big time OS, file system, networking, user interface possibilities of Linux.
Plus the fact that you can use all the Prop dev tools on the ARM for a self contained system in the space of a cigarette box.
I want to see a Prop II piggy back board for the Raspi. Do I have to do this myself?:)
If you do one I promise to buy at least one! :-)
I'll have to get a RaspPi to use it though.
Whilst the Prop II piggy back for the Pi might be Pi specific. The general idea is not. This should also work with Beagle Boards, IGEPs and so on. There is a huge array of such boards on the market already and more comming every day. Prices getting lower and lower.
Comments
-Phil
I'm finding the bloated vs bare metal discussion interesting. You know, I think most people want a mix most of the time. Where the constraints warrant it, bare metal makes sense because it has to. Where those aren't so indicative, people want easy, productive, robust, capable.
This is why I particularly like the idea of the helper chip. One can plug it in to the capable 'bloat' and from there, get bare metal stuff done without having to live with the implications of bare metal. A broad range of functions presented easy cheezy would make this a compelling add-on. Buy one, plug it into your Lindromacwin machine and go!
Need to get down and dirty? Author a program, send it down the wire, and enjoy the benefits more directly.
I personally love UNIX. I encounter many people who have trouble with it because they didn't get that core introduction most of us probably did. --That I did. Linux is awesome, as is BSD to name another ecosystem where one can strip it right down to the kernel, single user mode, and some program. It's not all that hard to do either. Bloat it up the other way and make a killer workstation / environment too. Do it all just the way you like it.
People have to know stuff to do that though. For some people, it's a lot of stuff seemingly, and for others, they appear to grok it right away and they are often seen out in the field somewhere doing their thing, getting it done, no worries.
Then again, I love Windows and Mac OS too. Yes, I said it. As long as it's not Windows 8... maybe it's better to say I love Windows 7 and XP both. They ended up reasonable OSes, and they are everywhere. Not sure if I like Android yet. Haven't got a system to hack on, but I will soon.
When people have centered on one OS, they tend to have trouble with others. I think this is true for applications, languages, and all sorts of things. Once they have gone the distance with more than one, they become experienced in that particular art and have a far easier time being flexible. The natural inclination is to not do that because the meta-tasks associated with that generally don't add value to the primary tasks at hand. Or so people think.
The reality is different. Yes, there will be some mucking about, but that doesn't typically endure, leaving somebody with a lot more choices than they had before.
Funny thing about lots of choices though. One must then choose! When there are fewer choices, that work goes away, sending people down a few well trodden paths, leaving them free to other considerations. Those that have the expanded set to work from will easily see where the few choices are not optimal, and they will be right about it, and the few choices people won't really care much because they got it done and are off doing something else they want done.
Making it about the tools in this way does not appeal to everybody, and where there are limits, there is art, right along with "good enough" and maybe that's why the Arduino makes so much sense to the artsy-fartsy crowd. Nothing wrong or bad about that crowd, mind you, it's just different from say, this one, or the many "pro" niches out there.
Then we've got the "need to manage time and head space people", and I'm in that group. When I had the freedom and time to really muck about, I did and I'm glad I did. But, I won't do it today, unless there is a big return because I know I can jump on any old box and go and get it done. Meta tasks are kind of expensive in this way.
Call those people "lean" minded people.
Somewhere in that nexus, P2 lives. Maybe it lives in more than one place. Personally, I think "lean" is an idea that can resonate with the P2. If you aren't about integrating everything, and more about a tool / technology that can get right at a task and complete it, I think a P2 is going to live there easily. P1 is that way, for the set of tasks it rocks on. Sometimes that's hard to see because we've pushed it way beyond where many, if not all of us, really thought it would go.
When considering marketing vs direct application type messaging, basic ideas form foundations that bubble up to the specific application, niche, task messaging, and one of those ideas surrounding the P2, is that a lean type approach can be taken. Say we've got it all done, the thing can be approached with C, SPIN, PASM, whatever else makes sense.
You connect it up, grab the core stuff you want to reuse, ideally author some glue code and then your specific task code, and it does the job, next. And I can do that with a fairly small set of dependencies, or other things I need to know or manage. That's lean. In this context, investing in the chip and it's tools means being able to razor sharp focus on something and do it with few issues and or dependencies. People who identify with that message will pick it up quick and be loyal. How many of them are there? Don't know, but they are there, and P2 will be attractive to them.
You guys have other single, two or few word core ideas like that to put out there? Mine is "lean" If you get started on a P2, you can get a whole lot done "in the box" and the attraction there is simply keeping the focus on the task to complete, not so much the meta-tasks, tools and such. I'm curious to read what you guys think in basic terms like that..
Shortest post EVER!
However, I also doubt that a propeller would be part of it. The microcontroller space is too crowded with ARM from $1 to $20 and FPGAs for all ranges as well with far better bit twiddling performance. A few pages ago the FPGA pricing was mentioned, and for the low volume customer, yes even small FPGA parts can be expensive, and that is on purpose. Xilinx/Altera focus on their big customers, the network guys who buy those huge parts but compile network protocols into hardware. And the variety of people that use to do ASICs. In both cases there are a smaller number of these customers but they use 10s if not 100s of thousands of those FPGAs. And when you get into that club you get very aggressive pricing.
So go ahead and dump on me, but beyond the hobbyist community I just don't see a commercial application for the prop. But that hobbyist/education community is a big place, and Parallax had quite a lead there.
OK, rather than bloat, let us call it under-utilized software.
I don't see any way the Props are getting into the automobile and appliance markets. Those guys already have a huge array of devices to choose from that already tailored to those applications with prices down in the cents.
Your claim is that hobbyists are not a market. Presumably because it's not such a big market or because that market is already saturated with Arduino's, Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bones and such like.
So there is nowhere to go.
As has been said above, I don't see a "killer app" but rather a lot of varied niches in which the Prop is applicable and the Prop II more so. It has that flexibility to be in many places whilst perhaps not being the optimal solution if you want to make a billion of whatever widget it is.
Failing that Parallax will have to survive on me ordering a couple of devices a year....
From http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/the-making-of-arduino/0
Imagine every Arduino board with a Prop-based shield bestowing upon all those artsy-fartsy "Sketches" some sort of magical power....
I'm just saying.
Remote client/server telepresence device.
The Prop2 would be the client (camera) and a PC would be the server (viewer).
The PC would be an ordinary machine with an Occulus Rift head mounted display.
The P2 would be on a board with 2 VGA cameras that are approximately 4.5 inches apart.
The P2 would take pictures at 30FPS and send a stereo data stream to the PC, which would display these on the HMD in realtime.
The motion sensor feedback from the HMD would be sent to the P2 to control a set of servos that implement a pan & tilt rig which the board is mounted to.
In this fashion you have a remote telepresence device that uses IMU feedback to control the view and gives the end user a stereo 3D view of the remote world.
If you combine this with a wireless protocol, you can mount the board on a variety of platforms, with or without the pan & tilt mechanism.
The Robotics crowd would love it, the hobby crowd would appreciate it, the R/C crowd would be nutso for it, and there are a whole host of makers and tinkerers that would find some unconventional use for it.
The second part of the gig is making a P2 viewer and leverage the video output capabilities. You could use either a large LCD and stand away from it and do the lazy eye 3D effect, or roll your own HMD with a 7" 800x480 display. I know that it's possible to make the P2 do DVI through a TFP410 chip, it would just be a 100% bit-banged display and not rely on buffering from the VID.
Something to think about, the max clock for DVI is 165 Mhz, and 1600x1200 uses a 161Mhz clock, it may be possible to do 1920x1080 at 160Mhz instead of the usual 150Mhz. At 160Mhz you can use the XFR to do DMA to the TFP410 and avoid the bit-banging.
Something very object oriented and event driven. Where you bring in blocks like LCD, VGATEXT, KEYBOARD, MOUSE, etc.
The KEYBOARD object would throw a "keypressed" event and you would have the LCD act on it.
Bean
Nor would I throw in the towel on industrial and scientific applications. As someone said earlier, little of it is "glamorous" and you won't see many (read "almost surely none") million-piece orders, but there is plenty of business to be had and many niches the Prop can possibly fill.
Great Bean!
Now you just gave Hanno 6 months worth of work!
I do like that notion, but I'd like to see it integrated with something like SimpleIDE -- I even drew some icons for such.
-Phil
I guess my digital story stick for woodworkers and boat lofters isn't going to be the Million Chip Killer Application.
Dont you mean - artsfy fartsy Hi Res Video effects at an ultra low price?.
How much will a basic board with a hi res video out be available for - any ideas?
Dave
I suspect such low hanging fruit would be very attractive until the product line can penetrate other larger markets.
-Phil
I was going to mention that, but didn't want to appear too negative.
24 million Kinect units have been sold... and they really don't support 3d viewing very well. If you are clever you can make the Kinect pick out the floor and map obstructions... pretty nice.
The Sony Bloggie 3D supports 3d teleconferencing and it can be had for $75(reconditioned). Add servo's, a joystick and a 3D TV on both ends and you are done... pretty nice.
The Prop2 will make a beautiful open source camera controller.
We have cars with stereo cameras in the grill and phones with 3d cameras. Robots need vision... and they need to see in 3D. So, streaming a stereocamera through a Prop2 and have it inspect various bits seems like a very good idea.
If you were to mix the engineering strategy of Kinect type devices with a stereo camera (stereo-photogrammetry), you would have a good job for a Prop2 and a terrific vision system,
and it wouldn't be incredibly hard to do.
The best advertising would be a series of kickstarters that make a bundle of money:)
Selling a million units in a reasonable period of time shouldn't be a problem. Industrial and institutional support will be required, but there is no reason to believe that this won't happen.
Advertising in the usual sense of the word has almost nothing to do with it. Some kinds of marketing won't really be possible until there is full documentation and an installed user base.
There will be a great need for books...and lots of them. If you are currently active on the P2 forum, you should be writing a book.
Rich
If Parallax wants to play with the big dogs then they better start making direct comparisons with devices like the SHARC, Sitara, M4 ARMs and other offerings. That means benchmarks(which Parallax avoids like the plague), white papers, real application notes, stop avoiding ESC. In regards to the ARM chips they also have to make the case that their single sourced, proprietary cpu is a better fit, than a ARM chip that a buyer can purchase almost anywhere. And yeah be ready to answer critics why the designer refused to incorporate JTAG.
Yes indeed. But let's think bigger. There are one million RaspberryPi's out there:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3375
The Prop and Arduino combo is nice but basically pointless.
The Prop and ARM combo is great. All the real-time real world interfacing possibilities of the Prop plus all the big time OS, file system, networking, user interface possibilities of Linux.
Plus the fact that you can use all the Prop dev tools on the ARM for a self contained system in the space of a cigarette box.
I want to see a Prop II piggy back board for the Raspi. Do I have to do this myself?:)
I'll have to get a RaspPi to use it though.
-Phil
Whilst the Prop II piggy back for the Pi might be Pi specific. The general idea is not. This should also work with Beagle Boards, IGEPs and so on. There is a huge array of such boards on the market already and more comming every day. Prices getting lower and lower.