The New Beaglebone X15

There's a very powerful new Open Source (hardware and software) embedded development board out from the makers of the Beaglebone series of boards.

The Beagleboard X15

This new board's  specs read more like a low end Intel NUC board's specs (ok.. maybe not). But the kicker is, the boards are open source, and there are ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SEVEN GPIO pins. These are broken out on 4 60 pin connectors along the bottom of the board. That is a ton of GPIO. For Comparison the Arduino has 16 GPIOs broken out, and the venerable Raspberry Pi has 26 GPIO pins.

Additionally it has eSATA and HDMI outputs.

And for once (!) they helped out case makers by placing the outputs mostly along two opposite sides of the board (instead of all around it randomly).

Backing up all these inputs and outputs are a 750-MHz C66x DSP and a Quad-core PRU and a Dual-core Cortex-M4. That's 7 independent cores (aside from the main OS processor) on 3 processors working on real time response to inputs or program logic.

I haven't even mentioned the 2 Gigabit RJ-45 Network ports, making it a handy stand alone router.

It runs Debian out of the box (from its embedded flash memory), peripherals can be hooked up via USB 3.0.

Unfortunately it will be over $1 per GPIO, the prices being mentioned are in the $200 range.

Making it as much as an HP Stream Mini, but that's a very different animal.

I hope to see these boards used in some projects to do some seriously heavy lifting.

Like for example running all the operations on just this board for a Pick and Place CNC machine with 4 axis movement and 3 cameras and multiple spool controls. Or a drone with all the automatic features and multiple cameras.

Prevailing thoughts on Technical Problems

Things are changing, excuse me for being impatient, but its taking a really long time. And skewing in a direction that, leaves most people with little to no control over things we should have control over (I think).
I just wrote a post about the new Glowforge "3d laser printer"

It looks amazingly useful and easy to use.

Much much better software and use of modern hardware and software to enable amazing things.

The prevailing thought has been for the longest time:

 "It should be hard"

I have never understood this.

People all up and down the chain of engineers and company management for dozens of companies putting out tools (like laser cutters but dozens of others) don't think about the time and effort value of thier customers. The software is terrible, it barely works, it's frustrating and time consuming. More of a hindrance than a help. You Have to stay within these parameters or it won't work AT ALL.

Why should it be hard?

I don't get it. Good on Glowforge for putting in the work to make using a cutter easier, its long overdue.

The bad skew I see in this is; everything is in the cloud. Which none of us users have any control over. Even worse, if you are in a less fortunate geographical situation, your machine may not work at all. I know local server management and image processing has distinct disadvantages, but what if glowforge (one day) goes belly up. Like so many abandoned music services suddenly their servers go dark.

Ease of use: Good, finally
Cloud: So So
Another thing I can't fix myself: Bad..

What's Next 9/22/2015

What's Next: A quick look into future technology news

Open Source Hardware:

Autodesk has pulled a complete turn around on open source policy as evidenced by the recent release of the designs for the ember printer, down to the recipe for the resin used. The ember is a desktop Stereolithography printer, that casts an image from a high resolution projector into optically actived resin.

Image Credit

NoSql Databases:
Scylla is a new rendition of NoSql Datastores. Written in a highly optimized C++ environment, taking maximum advantage of all available cores, this database leads to 1000% the performance of previous Java based solutions. Who knew, Java's not the fastest language in the world.

Scylla is also open sourced, instructions for install are here

CNC Camera Scanner

Tormach has developed hardware/software to scan a part with high accuracy with your CNC milling machine..

Tormach is a company that makes on of the most prominent CAM software packages around, Mach3.

CAM stands for Computer Aided Manufacturing. The CAM software is what sends the commands to a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine.

Tormach has built a milling machine attachment and a software package. At the end of the attachment is a microscope USB camera.

The CNC machine (commanded by the CAM software (Mach3)) moves the camera around over a part that you want scanned. While commanding the camera to take a series of pictures which are then stitched together and entered into another plugin that helps you to draw that part in your CAD software with a large amount of accuracy. Build Log claims accuracy down to a few thousands.

This is reverse engineering and copying to the N-th level.