XCore Exchange

That would certainly be huge marketing.

Oh and why is there no cheep arduino pin compatible xmos board still? Pretty much every major MCU manufacturer has one, Microchip, ST, Paralax, Freescale, Texas Instruments even! All of them dirt cheep.(And yes most of them are official boards, manufactured and sold by them)

I notice the Slice slot has no Circle/Square/Triangle/Star icons, so I hope that means it will support all existing Slices. The slot would need two full 8-bit ports and 12 1-bit ports, like a Triangle slot.

It's not exactly the same as the existing slot types, but it's close to a Triangle type in terms of port mix. That means you get 12 x 1b ports, albeit with 1 x 8b port, 1 x 4b port and half an 8b port rather than 2 x 8b ports. It does mean many of the existing slices (including GPIO & Ethernet) will work. We've already had the webserver demo running happily on this kit. The mapping needs changing because the port names are different, but that's it.

I'm wondering why the physical slot is vertical as opposed to edge-mounted like the existing SliceKit.

Cost! There's a big difference in price between edge and vertical connectors. If you need edge (or multiple slots), we have sliceKIT available already.

Also, you may notice that the 2 x 13 0.1" header bears a resemblance to a certain Raspberry PI, allowing the two talk to each other via SPI. In fact it's a 1:1 connection allowing either a piggy back config, or use of a direct IDC cable. There should be quite a few design problems that can be solved with an embedded linux computer connected to a highly responsive multi-core microcontroller with configurable IO.

Also, you may notice that the 2 x 13 0.1" header bears a resemblance to a certain Raspberry PI, allowing the two talk to each other via SPI. In fact it's a 1:1 connection allowing either a piggy back config, or use of a direct IDC cable. There should be quite a few design problems that can be solved with an embedded linux computer connected to a highly responsive multi-core microcontroller with configurable IO.

This is a nice feature but not sure about piggy back though, surely the connector should be at one end of the board for it to sit on top of the Rpi. However via an IDC cable this would be a handy compatibility in all sorts of ways. It also explains all of those NCs on the header!

P.S. Is one of those pins actually a D31, or am I misreading it?

regards
Al

Folknology wrote: P.S. Is one of those pins actually a D31, or am I misreading it?

I think you may be misreading D61, with a pesky via in the middle of the 6

Berni wrote:Looks pretty neat, just need to offer it for the right price.

How about the first 2500 who sign up get it for free?

http://www.xmos.com/startkit/promotion

Wow sure haven't expected that one, and at 15 bucks id sure say its a proper price for hobby use. Its cheep enough to just leave the board permanently soldered in to a project and just buy a new one, and you don't even need a XTAG dongle.

You might possibly want to try coaxing some of the hobbyist oriented online electronics stores like sparkfun and similar ones to sell it in there stores.

Putting together a series of videos on how to get started with the starterKit would be great too, like quickly introduce them to the eclipse environment and do a few simple XC programs to show how to blink a led and how to use multiple threads and such up to implementing a SPI port or something.

http://www.xmos.com/startkit

I see that there is a twitter feed on this page that shows all twitter posts with the startkit hashtag. I would not recommend this because you will not have control over the content on your corporate website. There are already some unrelated tweets in the feed, but it could be much worse of course..