Making Parallella known to the masses

[Olaf]

Up until a few days ago I even did not know about Parallella. And the reason is pretty obvious: "Now one knows that you exists."

So I stumbled by accident onto a Youtube clip about Raspberri Pie clusters so I wanted to make one too to get used to parallel computing.
The Epiphany is what makes Parallella very unique and triggered my curiosity.

The second problem is understanding what the Parallella boards do. Me as a n00b, I have absolutely no experience in these boards.
The information is lacking for uneducated people, like kids, or hobbyist. You really need top have some pages or blog posts that demonstrates step by step dumbed down for kids how they can create an exciting blinking led or so. I just give an example, but the information currently found is only understandable for university degree people that are already into this field.

I did find some dated Youtube clips but nothing that is from the year 2016!

Getting one is incredibility hard for none US people. We Europeans are scared to order something coming from the US because import taxes could add $30-$50 on top of your product. I have ordered one a few days ago but I almost did not. If I could buy it from an European country then I know that the price I paid does not come with a nasty surprise.

Last but not least, when I surfed your forum, I noticed that some people are complaining that they did not get their order. This can happen, but the worrying is that I see not response on the messages of these people. This almost made me not decide to pursue your product and go back to another board. Demonstrate that you take care of your customers. Every single one can become a starting point of interest by a big company.

[Olaf]

Just an update I received my Parallella board and Porcupine . Still lacking a power supply to fire it up.

The combined price is 197 euros + 21% import tax (41 Euros) because it came from the US so combined that is 238 Euros.
Converted to dollars that would be $271.

If the Parallella board would be sold in France or Germany, it would have costed me only 197 Euro's. So please please, make it available in Amazon FR or DE!

[cmcconnell]

[sebraa]

In Europe, the Parallella is available at http://www.digikey.de (Germany, 112 €) and uk.rs-online.com (UK, 97 £). Both stores currently list at least one version as being available.

There are other systems, which specifically target the groups you mention - Raspberry Pi, Arduino - and these systems have a huge market share (big communities) and big companies/foundations doing marketing. If you just look at all those "Pi" clones (Banana Pi, Orange Pi, ...) you'll notice that these boards have much smaller communities, because most hobbyists turn to the big communities. Adapteva is an extremely small company and simply cannot provide this amount of handholding and community support - or marketing, for that matter. After the Kickstarter campaign, it did not gain too much traction and since it was cheaper than Xilinx' ZedBoard, many people used it as a cheaper Zynq development board and ignored the Epiphany chip. That's at least what I think. Since then, other systems have become available and many people just moved away from the Parallella to other areas.

On a different note, I don't think that the Parallella is for the uneducated masses (informed hobbyists, maybe), because there is virtually no software support apart from development kits. The Epiphany chip is not strictly "easy to use" either (at least debugging it isn't), if you care much about performance either. Even blinking multiple LEDs is troublesome, because you can't connect hardware to the Parallella unless you have the Porcupine (which costs additional money) or enough knowledge and tools.

Finally, development for the Parallella is still ongoing and this forum - while small - is of decent quality. So, welcome to the world of the Parallella!

[Olaf]

[Olaf]

[cmcconnell]

[Olaf]