Aijuboard – A Computer Based on the Zynq-7000 SoC with FPGA Running Plan 9 | Hacker News Reader

Aijuboard – A Computer Based on the Zynq-7000 SoC with FPGA Running Plan 9

indiegogo.com

56 pointsjpm912 comments

You can also run Plan 9 on the Raspberry Pi, apparently - http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/raspberry_pi/

The Aijuboard has lots of cool features like non-usb full gigabit ethernet though.

I'm also curious of the kind of things you could do with the FPGA too.

Why not just port Plan 9 to a Parallella board ?

They do plan to have SATA which isn't on any other Zynq dev board AFAIK, this will require some FPGA work as it isn't provided by the SoC.

However there are implementations for Xilinx FPGAs, like this OpenCores one: http://opencores.org/project,sata_controller_core

I can imagine a couple of students with a lot of free time could get it ported over to the newer FPGA and start thinking about the kernel driver workup for it.

The point was for this one guy (aiju) to see if he could design and build a whole working computer. If I could afford one, I'd get one as much for the purpose of supporting heroic individual effort -- I witnessed some of his struggles -- as for any other reason.

I'm surprised that they have a hard limit of maximum of 10 boards and set their campaign funding threshold to be exactly that. This, together with the very high $100-no-real-reward-minimum-contribution definitely stops it to be a more than "an okay success" even if the funding goal is met.

Not that people are aren't allowed to do thing the way they want, just it's unusual. Makes me guess it can be a project where they already know mostly who the contributors will be. But then why go through crowdfunding and their cuts, instead of a simple site and a payment button?

>> Will there be more boards beyond the ten offered currently?

> Depending on how much money is raised we will increase the number of boards manufactured which will be offered either as perks here or will be available for sale later.

Quote from the Risks and Challenges section of the OA

"you do need to keep in mind that you are supporting a research project and not buying an off-the-shelf product"

Perhaps they just want to keep the amount of money involved small in case of encountering a show-stopper later on?

I take your point, and a sticker or something at $10 might encourage some coffee-jar type contributions.

The hard limit is to do with practicalities of low-volume production when you're not sure if enough people will buy them. All ten boards need to be funded (one way or another) for production to go ahead at all.

Another practicality is the EU's draconian electronics-approval laws. The USA exempts prototypes from approval, but the EU doesn't. The board designer is German, so EU laws mean he can't legally sell or even give away these boards himself, unless he first sinks thousands of dollars and more time than he spent on the board itself into regulatory paperwork. That's the reason it's on IndieGoGo at all; He needed a USA resident to both handle the financing and get the board produced all within the USA. IndieGoGo was the least bad financing option he found.

Interesting, do you have any pointers for me regarding these laws? I know that it's a very complex (and complicated, and misunderstood) area of making things. Would expect that such things would bite e.g. sellers on Tindie very soon too. I'm also an EU citizen, though living in Asia, trying to figure out how these rules work for hardware the open source hardware and prototypes I make.

> 1 GB of RAM (can be configured as 512 MB of error-corrected RAM instead)

Can this be done in Linux?

It is a feature of the DDR controller in the Zynq SoC so it could be done for any OS.

New perks added!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com