By now, those of us who are still active on the Parallella will have a pretty good idea of what it can do. It seems to me that for it to have a viable long term future it needs to find a niche where it can comprehensively out perform other platforms. I believe that it strengths are low cost, low power, mobility and processing power.
Looking at the apps that have been discussed on this forum I feel that the winners are:
- Mobile Software Defined Radio
- Remote sensing and
- Education
Mobile SDR: If you watch some of Balint Seeber's Youtube videos he sometimes shows his mobile setup which usually consists of his car with two or more laptops on the passenger seat and a couple of other boxes on the back seat (e.g. at 15:40). All of this could run on one Parallella with a SDR card attached. While this might be possible if impractical in a car, a truly mobile setup would have to be much more portable.
Remote Sensing: Most remote devices ship data back to a base station for processing. If this is not practical, either due to the volume of data, the cost of transmission or the need for fast processing, the Parallella can deliver the raw power on the device. This video from MIT shows the last case . The model planes have forward-looking two cameras on each wingtip which passes the video stream back to two quad core CPUs (no other details given). Watching the footage with the flight path and obstacles superimposed it seems as if the CPUs were fairly heavily loaded given that the evasive action generally comes at the last second.
Education: Finally, there are not other platforms out there that I know of that delivers the opportunity to learn distributed memory parallel programming at such a low price point.
Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? I think that focusing on the platform's strong points will achieve the best outcome for the effort involved.
nickStatistics: Posted by nickoppen — Wed Sep 07, 2016 1:00 pm
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