Rasky, raspberry pi 2 KVM over IP

Long time (too many months) is passed without updates. This was due to the missing goal of the crowdfunding campaign and some personal issues.

Anyway, despite my long silence on Rasky, i have great news, and in those months I've worked out some tests on both hw and software side, and, amazingly and unbelievably they fully worked at first try.

Also, the prototype was tested on rpi2 B+ AND rpi3 with success, rpi3 is working even better thanks to a faster bus clock and more resources in general.

This allowed me to move forward and start to optimize the design for final production.

I'm working on the new and final PCB, the one i will finally ship, and, if anything goes as expected, i will be able to ship to backers before the end of the year, probably first PCB even before the end of October.

The new PCB design will introduce a lot of simplifications and optimizations, and will get rid of most of the useless hardware and components there was on the prototype. The most notable changes are:

- Get rid of all the useless I/O buffers, we don't need to connect every chipset to every SPI/I2C, they all work great on the RPI, so, only a single buffer to manage different voltage levels is needed, no more duplication.

- Power supply circuit completely revisited, battery support removed as I have now a board that can stacked up with Rasky to provide this functionality, and removing it will simplify the circuits, will drive down costs, and will let anyone doesn't want to use it doesn't pay for it. The supporters of the project will have a SafePI included in rewards.

Stay tuned, in next few days i will put online new material, schematics and PCB design for the new board.

Thanks to all backers for your patience, Rasky is back and it's here to stay and get real!

First assembled Rasky is ready for tests.
There are a couple of wrong components footprint that need to be fixed, but it's good enough to start writing the needed low level software and then deeply testing it, this is a great milestone reached!

Next month i will focus on the software part and in testing the first board, and hoping all goes well, i will proceed to the first "beta" version production batch

The schematic for Rasky is now complete. A couple of notes:

- Rasky will have a power supply circuit to manage 4x Ni-MH AA rechargeable batteries used to assure safe/clean shutdown of the raspberry in case of power loss or failure

- The ATMEGA used for keyboard and mouse emulation can be reprogrammed from the raspberry, so, a future update to add usb storage emulation can be pushed without external hw

The final schematic is here, details of this update: https://www.nexlab.net/product/rasky/#tab-status-updates

A couple of 3d models of the board

The most relevant change is the CPLD that is changed from MaxII EPM240 do EPM570.

Details and schematics on https://www.nexlab.net/2015/09/03/rasky-update-schematic-almost-complete/

Choose how to transfer grabbed frames to the raspberry pi is a central part of the project as it's probably the harder part where it's easy to loose to many performances. I've just posted an update explaining how i come to choose to do that over SPI bus
Full story at https://www.nexlab.net/2015/08/19/rasky-update-choosing-how-to-connect-the-cpld-to-raspberrypi/