Parallella Community

Cool! (no pun intended)

HBE

How i dream parallella 2.0.

- reduce nm geometry to reduce heat and eliminate necessity of fan
- 2 LAN 1Gb/s
- replace mini connectors (HDMI, USB) with standard size connectors
- increase size of board(6x10cm will kill noone) to host standard size connectors
- add pins RX/RT to allow serial comunication (minicom or similar)

Having played a couple days with it, lots of ideas for the "next gen" parallella, but assuming this would be more of a version 1.2 board to get things out the door again.....
I like Andrew's case design but I think there should be a small fan included with the board itself. Basically everything you need to not fry the board should come with the board AND it should just click on somehow. I had three fans I could have used, but I thinking slightly more mass market, not everyone will. Having looked at the thermal images, it looks like two whatevers next to the parallella chip wouldn't mind a bit of cooling either - maybe a square from approximately where the TP14 and TP12 mounts are to support this. The smaller holes which look like they're for the elink stuff on the reverse would be in the perfect place.

PLEASE, do _not_ change the form factor / hole position / connector position and pinout. Expansions have to be easily compatible without both rev 1.1 and 2.0 ....

Just got my board... here is my wishlist for 2.0:
* add a jumper to select booting from QSPI or SD-card (BOOT_MODE[2] low/high) as a failsafe for messing with u-boot.
* or better yet, replace the serial connector with USB header and add one of those FTDI chips with USB <-> serial converter and host controllable IO, the IO could be used to select the boot mode, reset the board, brigde JTAG to USB, etc.
* to reduce cost and make room, I would let the HDMI to go as there are no GPU nor media accelerator in the chip anyway.
* please keep the USB OTG port, the cable is issue is not that bad and OTG gives some flexibility.
* replace at least the power and GPIO PEC-connectors with something more accessible (kinda turning this into arduino on steroids

svartalf and all,

Clearly this is a very difficult "gen2" type of problem. There have been lots of complaints about the mechanics of the micro-USB connector. If we move to a full size connector, then the connections on that side will need to be adjusted. This would be a catastrophe for anyone with a custom case. Inputs appreciated...

My guarantee:
-mounting holes, samtec connector positions, and board size will not change!

Up for discussion:
-Tempted to do something with YID/XID...(8 free pins)..but will work to make it backwards compatible

Andreas