The Ware for April 2014 is a Propeller II from Parallax. Kudos to David for nailing it; email me for your prize!
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2014 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
5 Responses to “Winner, Name that Ware April 2014”
So is Propeller II a new multi-core microcontroller asic that parallax is developing for multirotors/uavs, or is it an (open source?) fpga design that anyone can be programmed onto an Altera DE0 or Cyclone V?
The product page is a forum link so it’s not blatantly clear :(
The Propeller 1 & 2 are unique 8 core 32 bit microcontrollers. Each core has a small amount of local private code+data RAM and there is a shared pool of data RAM which is accessed atomically via a round-robin process. The GPIO pins are shared by all cores. There is also an onboard ROM containing the bootloader (IPL via serial EEPROM or serial IO) and a custom HLL interpreter which supports the unique architecture.
I’m most familiar with the Prop 1, particularly with it’s analog TV generation capabilities. I believe there have been attempts to create an FPGA version of the P1 via reverse engineering.
Not sure what the ‘Spin Interpreter’ is but that sounds cool! And it comes with all design/configuration files to build against an altera de0 cyclone iv board.
Hi
I am not sure which of my two email addresses I used when I ‘named the ware’ which might explain if they dont match :)
regards
David
So is Propeller II a new multi-core microcontroller asic that parallax is developing for multirotors/uavs, or is it an (open source?) fpga design that anyone can be programmed onto an Altera DE0 or Cyclone V?
The product page is a forum link so it’s not blatantly clear :(
IIUC, the propeller is not specifically made for UAVs, and is not open source. That’s just a multicore MCU.
The Propeller 1 & 2 are unique 8 core 32 bit microcontrollers. Each core has a small amount of local private code+data RAM and there is a shared pool of data RAM which is accessed atomically via a round-robin process. The GPIO pins are shared by all cores. There is also an onboard ROM containing the bootloader (IPL via serial EEPROM or serial IO) and a custom HLL interpreter which supports the unique architecture.
I’m most familiar with the Prop 1, particularly with it’s analog TV generation capabilities. I believe there have been attempts to create an FPGA version of the P1 via reverse engineering.
Parallax has released all the source (verilog, mask roms, etc) for their original (2006/2008) propeller
http://www.parallax.com/microcontrollers/propeller-1-open-source
Not sure what the ‘Spin Interpreter’ is but that sounds cool! And it comes with all design/configuration files to build against an altera de0 cyclone iv board.