[Noisebridge-discuss] XMOS.

[Andrew Back]

Hello,

I was chatting to Miloh about the new XMOS processors at last night's
Circuit Hacking, and realised that these might be of interest to the
wider Noisebridge group. They're related to the rather cool transputer
[1], pack a bit more power than your average microcontroller and are
sort of positioned between an MCU and FPGA. Like the transputer they
are trivial to connect together to form parallel systems, and this is
supported via their concurrency extensions to C/C++. The devices are
fairly cheap, support 8 hardware threads per core (current devices
have 1 - 4 cores), include plenty of I/O, and XMOS appear keen to
support the hacking community (via open source code, PCB layouts and
reasonably priced dev kits etc). So, it looks like fun platform to
experiment with...

Nice video playback demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO8yctCSUU0

Very simple audio player:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paqgrL5Av4Y&feature=related

For more info see:

http://www.xmos.com

I plan to be at Noisebridge this evening and will bring the dev kit I
have in case anyone would like to see one (not that it looks that
interesting).

Cheers,

Andrew

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

-- 
Andrew Back