XCore Exchange

Hi all

Im new to your forum, came here by way of a youtube video showing an LED cube...

I have a few different kinds of dev boards but want to try out some hardware and was not sure where to start. A used setup would be best right now.

Just finished building a 4x LED cube but havent connected it up to anything yet... turns out my pc motherboard didnt come with the printer port (Asus P5W DH deluxe), and 2 laptops dont have one, and I dont have the expansion docking station? what a hassle to find a working parallel port. so far only have a Rabbit semi rcm3400 dev kit, will try driving it with this; Then it would be nice to compare to the XCore

Hi iBradleyAllen,

It probably depends on where you are, but I know that Digikey is the main source in North America. Sparkfun has a custom board that they developed, which is perhaps the cheapest option; however they are in the process of doing some revisions to address user comments. The XMOS XK-1 or XC-1A development kits are the most common and have a good user base (as well as being reasonably priced). If you mean used as in pre-owned, I don't know where to tell you to look; other forum members might have ideas, but I think you'll find most of us are pretty attached to our XCores.

The best choice of board depends on what else you would like to get from the hardware, how many I/O ports you need, and your processing requirements. Any feelings on what else you might want to do with a dev board?

Hi bsmithyman,

Yes it comes down to not having a budget. Thanks for that link they have some great products!

What Im hoping to do is 2 things, realtime processing and I/O data streaming. its a hassle to try to make one processor manage interrupts, in fact its a waste of time. a single cpu thats running on average about 60% useage and streaming data fine can hit an rare combination of some interrupt condition that breaks the data flow, which is unacceptable.

simple embedded stuff, Im always interested in finding a low cost processor with great support; but i want to find the parallel setup and play with that... gotta run

I would go with the XC-1A. It allows you to try multi-core programming, but also use it just like a single core device. If you do not need the chaining ability, its a great solution. My only complaint is that UART connection is useless for transmitting lots of data. For that, the XTAG would be better.

Hi iBradleyAllen

About a year ago I put together a quick comparison of the Xmos boards costing < $100

No budget - try to win it!

http://xcore.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=698

lilltroll wrote:No budget - try to win it!

http://xcore.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=698

OR: http://www.xcore.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=15