Archive → February, 2010
Energy Monitoring
Was at a friends today and he showed me an energy monitor that he had bought and was using to monitor his electricity supply. I was like “hmm… this could be something fun to attach to an XCore and get some graphs out of”.
My thought is to use my XC-3 (or maybe get an XC-2) to connect to an energy monitor receiver – or hack/make a receiver and then push the data somewhere useful via Ethernet. In fact I could combine it with my network monitor, ditch the screen and have it push the all the different types of data out into some nice pretty graphs. Anyway, enough brain dump – onto the hardware!
Lasers and Submarines
Over the last few weeks I have come across some nice XMOS based projects:
1) Laser Cutter
Not massively complex in terms of software – but a pretty cool outcome. UART in – granite engravings out! Nice… Maybe an ethernet interface with a web client to upload images into it could come next… laser engraver source code here
The main purpose of the project it’s to create an autonomus vehicle to explore lakes and reefs. Aquatic Bot Explorer (ABE) its based on a ROV (Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles ) and AUV (Autonomus Underwater Vehicles ) class robots.
This bot it’s powered by an XK-1 processor by XMOS, several boards for sensing: pressure, temperature, depth, etc. Motor control, demux, ADC, etc. are developed.
Looks pretty cool… can’t wait to see what it turns up from the depths!
XMOS XS-1 Virtual Threads
The XMOS XS-1 architecture is a multi-threaded architecture. As opposed to normal systems it has a single processor core that can run 8 hardware threads, in real-time with no operating system overhead. But what happens if you run out of threads… 2 answers: either (1) add more cores or (2) virtualize.
So I thought I would do option (2) as option (1) is too easy in the XMOS architecture and its not very efficient if I want to run 1MIPs processes on a thread that has 50MIPs available. The code for this is freely available from the virtual threads sourceforge page.
More information after the break…
Hackaday
XMOS Community