Parallella 7010 no GPIO - no Samtec Connectors

[greytery]

Been waiting 9 months for these babies - and my twin "No GPIO / Zynq7010" boards have finally arrived. Not yet given the traditional sharp smack on the bottom to power them into life.

But I was astonished when turning them over to find : NO Samtec Connectors at all!

7010-bottom.png (985.1 KiB) Viewed 21718 times

OK, so I get the phrase "no GPIO" but why does that mean no PEC's at all? No North and South? No Power PEC? I cant see this mentioned in the manual, or anywhere.
The shop website still gives the following information for the 7010:

E16-7010 spec.PNG (16.23 KiB) Viewed 21718 times

Now, I had no immediate plans to attempt to use any of the expansion ports, and intend to power up and get playing. But others who have ended up with 7010's like this may be dissappointed.

An explanation, please.

tery

[tnt]

That kind of seemed obvious that there would be none of the connectors, what were you expecting ? Just remove the one for GPIO ? That wouldn't make that much of a difference. The interest of that config is to cut down price by removing the expensive connectors (but removing a single one wouldn't make _that_ much of a difference) and to cut down the height of the board a bit (which again would make no sense if the other 3 connectors were there).

[greytery]

tnt,

The only obvious thing is not having the GPIO connector: 7010 has fewer pins available for GPIO so there's some logic in not fixing that socket which wouldn't be connected anyway. OK, I'll let you have the point that it would not save a lot of money to leave just three samtec's. When ordering I was not given a 'cheaper' option: $99 each.

But a wobbly parallella because it's only got three legs?? My, how I chuckled at the thought .

The remaining 7010 logic still supports the pins on the Power PEC. The Power PEC also provides useful features such as setting the coordinates of the board. North/South PECs are driven by the Epiphany (aren't they?).

Nowhere does it say that the 7010 boards are NEVER going to be useful in a cluster (connected via eLink that is).

tery

[tnt]

The 7010 has less GPIO on the FPGA, not none. Half the GPIOs would be active if the GPIO samtec was fitted.

The parallella reference manual in the section "build options" also talks about "samtec expansions connectors" (plural) and not about PEC-GPIO specifically.

[aolofsson]

tery,

You have been very supportive for a long time and I hate for you to be disappointed! When there is a misunderstanding like this, I do think that most of the blame goes to the communicator (" adapteva") (not the communicatee). We thought we made it "clear enough", but obviously we should have been more explicit in the writing.

This is really helpful feedback. We are getting really close to opening up the shop again and we will make sure we edit the description to avoid misunderstandings going forward!

Sincerely,
Andreas

[greytery]

[tnt]

[greytery]

[FHuettig]

[tnt]

I'm wondering if pulldowns are better actually (does the fpga support that).