Parallella Community

A minor thing that tripped me up and would most likely be too much work to fix.

I ended up purchasing as a microhdmi to hdmi since I just wanted to output to TV. It arrives here and don't think anything of it until I try to testplug everything in since I'm still waiting on microusb to usb.

No horizontal clearance. The microhdmi to hdmi plug has a large bend, and that bend doesn't allow me to plug in a microusb slot. So I can either type, or see what's going on unless I want to chance it by barely having the cables in, and this is after I shaved off a large part of the casing.

I would LIKE future versions to have the sd be where the hdmi is, but I know re-doing the traces is a huge pain. I'd prefer a note though somewhere "When getting microhdmi, remember low horizontal clearance" or something.

So not use an adapter like this - the weight and size will put forces on the HDMI connector which will break it off the board!

Know this is a bit late but two bobs worth anyway.

Good having the UART pin headers as a fallback position but a little thing I always do on my boards is have the ground in the middle of the TX and RX and put a couple of low value resistors in series on the TX lines (just in case although generally driving sources each end probably not so great as to destroy chips anyway).

Means if one gets the direction wrong just have to spin the connector 180 degrees.

Cheers
Stefan

I'd really like to see a move away from the credit card sized form factor. Small is good, but the next generation board doesn't need to be THAT small. A somewhat larger board would enable better heat dissipation and standard sized ports.

A low power option with a different ARM that doesn't include the FPGA. Right now the low power promise of the Adapteva architecture is not being demonstrated. Don't get me wrong, I like the current version and there are probably going to be some very cool things done with it but not everyone needs the FPGA. I realize this would mean implementing the glue logic currently in the FPGA in real silicon so that is probably a ways off. It sure would be useful in demonstrating the true watt/FLOP advantage of the epiphany though.

Maybe slightly off-topic because it's not related to the PCB board design directly:

It would be good to have a case design that integrates the cooling in a way that is guaranteed to work. E.g. Adapteva could partner with a third party company like Pimoroni who made the iconic Pibow case http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pibow ... ry-pi-case so people could order a case that has mountings for a fan and ventilation vents that are sufficient.
Cheers
HB

<shameless plug>I've made a available that includes a fan and low profile heatsinks</shameless plug>.

Cheers,

Andrew