The Parallella board was designed for one purpose SPEEEEED! This was the reason we chose the backside Samtec connectors instead of something more hacker friendly like a 0.1″ pin header. With the current Samtec backside connectors we have a total of 240 backside pins and a peak bandwidth of 50 Gbps, which is pretty insane for a credit card sized board! The drawback of the the Samtec connectors is the 0.5mm pitch which makes them impossible to work with without considerable soldering skills (and equipment).
To make the Parallella pin access easier, our very own Fred designed a breakout board “Porcupine” for the Parallella over the summer and released it as open source hardware (gerber & schematic). Since then we have been giving away quite a few boards to worthwhile projects and I am happy to tell you that we are now putting the board up for sale through our distribution channels.
The Porcupine includes the following features:
- All of the Parallella PEC_FPGA and PEC_POWER signals exposed as 0.1″ header signals.
- A convenient PMOD connector for plugging in a variety of analog peripherals.
- Insulation-displacement connectors for the PEC_NORTH and PEC_SOUTH connectors.
- A JTAG header for FPGA development and reflashing the board.
The Porcupine is now available for purchase at Digi-Key!! (BUY HERE)
There are currently only 59 available at Digi-Key so if you are itching to get going on a Parallella project I suggest you grab one quickly.
Cheers,
Andreas
Are there any plans on to make it available via RS Components? Digi-Key’s international shipping fees are quite prohibitive for such a small order.
Digi-key don’t appear to have any of these, and lead time information suggests they won’t be available until March 2015 at the earliest – is this true, and is there an alternative place to buy these from in Europe?
Many Thanks
Rog.
Any news if and when there will be another batch of these coming or was this one-time shot? This board looks exactly what I am missing…
Where can one source the cables to interconnect porcupine boards?
There’s a useful set of DigiKey links in the discussion here https://parallella.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3207&start=10#p16066
I need these breakout board asap for my research project. Any place where I can get it right away?
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