Multiple Propeller and 1 FPGA ;-)
franksanderdo
Posts: 14
Hey Ho and thanks for all the help from the Forum till now!!
Ok Ok I know, some of you will say now that I never asked a question before.
In fact I did, but only to the search engine :cool: I am really impressed that I found to all my beginners questions several answers. Almost all of them with explanation that I had a good chance to understand :thumb: There for again: Thanks a lot!!
What I enjoyed most was the open discussions that started with an idea and ended up in very interesting solutions.
I started about 3 month ago looking into the Prop1. Have by now learned some basics of spin as well as PASM and got running different LCD. I know it is kind of stupid not using OBEX for that, but I needed to learn and understand SPIN and the LCD controllers my self, copying some code would not have helped me.
Now to my Idea:
As my education does not allow me to follow the details of Prop2 development, and my Budget only allowed me a Lattice MachXO2 Demo Board I am thinking about playing with a Multiprocessor ( means multi 8 Cogs ;-) ) concept that uses some of the INMOS Transputer Communication Ideas.
Right now I only have rough Ideas put together what I want to achieve:
a) using minimum possible pins to communicate with and between Props (or cogs?)
Here I have in mind some thing similar to the INMOS channel system
b) some "extension" to spin which allows to load Objects to Cog(n) on Processor(m)
This "project" is not at all questioning any of the already existing parallel prop solutions. I am not even sure if my idea can work.
It is a mixture of curiosity, nostalgia and and effort to keep my brain spinning. In case any body of you like to spend a thought on it, please do and speak (write) it out ;-)
See you around
Frank
Ok Ok I know, some of you will say now that I never asked a question before.
In fact I did, but only to the search engine :cool: I am really impressed that I found to all my beginners questions several answers. Almost all of them with explanation that I had a good chance to understand :thumb: There for again: Thanks a lot!!
What I enjoyed most was the open discussions that started with an idea and ended up in very interesting solutions.
I started about 3 month ago looking into the Prop1. Have by now learned some basics of spin as well as PASM and got running different LCD. I know it is kind of stupid not using OBEX for that, but I needed to learn and understand SPIN and the LCD controllers my self, copying some code would not have helped me.
Now to my Idea:
As my education does not allow me to follow the details of Prop2 development, and my Budget only allowed me a Lattice MachXO2 Demo Board I am thinking about playing with a Multiprocessor ( means multi 8 Cogs ;-) ) concept that uses some of the INMOS Transputer Communication Ideas.
Right now I only have rough Ideas put together what I want to achieve:
a) using minimum possible pins to communicate with and between Props (or cogs?)
Here I have in mind some thing similar to the INMOS channel system
b) some "extension" to spin which allows to load Objects to Cog(n) on Processor(m)
This "project" is not at all questioning any of the already existing parallel prop solutions. I am not even sure if my idea can work.
It is a mixture of curiosity, nostalgia and and effort to keep my brain spinning. In case any body of you like to spend a thought on it, please do and speak (write) it out ;-)
See you around
Frank
Comments
b) Spin really is not meant for this sort of use and the way it's organized internally doesn't really allow for this. There was a thread once on trying to do this. It involved making up dummy Spin methods and patching the internal Spin tables at run-time to point to the loaded object code. The Propeller Wiki has some pages on this sort of thing. You might do better using PropForth which is designed for this sort of use.
thanks a lot for the input.
I have to agree on the Spin issue, I was hoping that I was missing some thing when I figured Spin might not support my Ideas very well.
There for I started learning PASM ;-) Some how I missed to look deeper into PropForth which I will change right now.
The issue with INMOS like communications is less the the part between 2 Props. It is more the fact, that INMOS made all communication (between processes AND to the world) as a kind of unbuffered channels. The Process just gets informed about the channel end(s) to use. Sending as well as receiving information was unbuffered and caused the process waiting until finished.
Next to exchanging Information, this allowed to synchronize processes even if they were running on different processors.
To create channels to world from each cog seems not to be to much a problem.
Where I am scratching my head about is how I do that best between cogs in one processor.
See you around
Frank