Lutetium
@Chip Gracey - marketing question! What's the ideal application? Do you foresee people using it as general-purpose or for a specific app? Maybe some of the forum members can share ideas.
I think this interactive programming style would work best in combination with APL :-)
Ahem... @Chip Gracey I am looking, but I don't see the P2 as a Hackaday IO project ;-)
@Chip Gracey I have been following your work for perhaps 15 years - and I am so pleased that P2 is coming to fruition. I totally buy into your educational ethos, and I hope that P2 will give more power to the next generation of engineers and creatives
Maybe you can post it and see people posting ideas about it ;-)
CNC machines and 3D printers along with drone controllers
Social platforms are a great way to generate product ideas IMHO ;-)
Well, I just said... as a reader for our encoders which must do ATAN2. Multiple cores and A2D chanels means we could support more joints with one chip. Won't beat an FPGA, but might cost a lot less and be useful for the human input device to remote the Dexter robot arm.
Ideal application? Not sure. I mainly see it as an inventor's playground, and trust that it will find applications.
Thanks @monsonite
How it handles Multimedia ? Audio, DSP, Image Processing ?
AI is also a very good application, especially for small robots
It probably makes a very good small AI platform
@james, it might not beat an FPGA in throughput potential, but it would be fast enough and code changes would take 1/500th the effort. A person might go to their grave getting Verilog code ironed out.
I have several Propeller projects on Hackaday.io/jac but my current project is reverse engineering a Digital Compact Cassette recorder. I think the P1 and P2 would be a good match if it would be easier to bring up the interfaces (SPI, RS-232).
Chip : then switch to VHDL ;-)
Maybe the question is better phrased as What application can the P2 excel at?
Yeah, robots are an ideal app.
@Yann, yes with VHDL we could retain all the complexity, but type four times as much code.
@Chip Gracey we don't use verilog or any text based language for our FPGA programming. totally visual language. wish I could say more, it's still fucking tied up in business shit, but will be open sourced soon.
We're coming up on an hour, which is usually how long we go before giving the host(s) a chance to bail and get back to work. Parallax folks, you're welcome to stay on and keep fielding questions, or to bug out if you need to. Either way, I think we all want to say a huge thank you for your time today!
Hack Chatters, don't forget next week's Chat is "Clean Water Technologies" with Ryan Beltran: https://hackaday.io/event/166179-clean-water-technologies-hack-chat
I recently tried SpinalHDL a bit, a better alternative to Chisel, which in turn is much better than VHDL or Verilog, makes it really easy to rpogram things for FPGAs (if you know Scala)
Agree w/ comments re: CNC usage. Multiaxis motor control for p2, along with lots of sensor inputs, seems like a straightforward educational use. But eventually, practically speaking, you end up using a "real" motor controller in a production setting. I'd like to see how P2 compares to something like Jetson when it comes to AI / ML.
I have developed the PMC-Eight system for Explore Scientific which is an astronomical robotic mount controller that excels at fine motion control for tracking the stars with the P1 chip. I am hoping to migrate to the P2 next year.
The P2 will excel in places where you need to close complex feedback loops and also conduct things at a high level.
We have sold over a thousand systems so far in 3 years
As to unique applications, it seems like anything were you need to parallel process or pipeline processing. Neural Nets seems a good application.
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