some thoughts on SAKC

Wolfgang Spraul wolfgang at sharism.cc
Sat Feb 27 08:33:47 EST 2010


Hi,
Bas and I sent some short private mails back and forth, and suddenly it
had turned into a long thread about many things, so we wanted to rescue
at least the SAKC part for the list... (the rest was too random...)

Wolfgang about SAKC:

> About SAKC, I hope SAKC in general is interesting for you. We talked about
> those analog/digital connector standards once, guess those standard
> connectors are not on SAKC?

Bas reply:

No, but that's no problem.  It's trivial to solder some converters.
Especially for the target audience (scientists), soldering is not a
barrier at all.  For some teachers it could be; here in the Netherlands
they have a technical assistant though.  But I know tey don't in other
countries.  For this use-case, it's probably good to sell the converters
as well.

Wolfgang:

> I have some problems seeing a big potential market for SAKC, so feedback from
> someone like you is actually very important. If you cannot wrap your head
> around SAKC, become excited about it and see some potential use in education,
> then something is probably wrong with it :-)

Bas:

Well, for me it's actually not too clear what's the great benefit of it.
What I think would be really useful, is analog and digital inputs and
outputs (the analog outputs may be pulsed digital outputs, but they
should be high-power, something like 0.5A or more).

However, I can get these with an attiny chip as well, (plus a transistor
for the output), for about 5 euros.  (I'm going to use those in my
version of the RepRap, instead of Arduino-based boards, which cost ten
times as much.)

Wolfgang:

> For now the one thing I attach myself too is the low price. I think a good
> quality board with CPU + FPGA for 99 USD is rare, if it exists at all.

Bas:

This is true, but that means the focus should be on the FPGA+CPU, not on
having (analog) i/o, because that's possible for much less money.

The main feature is probably that it can control the i/o with a
real-time system, from a non-real-time system, such as GNU/Linux.  If
the host system on the NanoNote is real-time (such as Iris), then I
think there is not much added value to the computing power in the SAKC.
I can imagine it being useful for scientific applications, where a
specific task is to be performed and it should store things locally
because of the limited bandwith between SAKC adn host, but for high
school experiments, the only important thing is that there are i/o pins;
the bandwidth is no problem at all.  And having something which is more
powerful is usually just confusing the matter.

Wolfgang:

> But then we have a huge software and marketing challenge, so I'm not sure...

Bas:

Yes, this is something that probably needs thinking.  I think there may
be use cases for scientific applications, as I wrote, and in places
where a standalone thinking unit is required, but a computer is too
large and/or takes too much power.

-----
So much from Wolfgang and Bas about SAKC, work continues see

Production schedule: http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/SAKC_run_1_schedule
Software environment: http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Development_Tools
Status report: http://en.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/developer/2010-February/002120.html

Wolfgang




More information about the discussion mailing list


interactive