On Friday 19 October 2012 22:32:26 [email protected] wrote: > >> Please consider joining us and donating. > > > >Someone else who uses the mail interface? I'm already a member and > >have also donated twice recently (once as leny2010 and another because > >I forgot to login to the site as plain Andrew Lindley.) > > Sorry. I was referring to supporting the Parallella Kickstarter project. It > is currently about $400,000 out of the $750,000 needed for funding to > happen.
In which case I fully agree with you. Perhaps people need some project ideas to spark their interest? How about: Port Tachyon (free software ray-tracing) - currently Tachyon's market is dominated by the free-as-in-beer POVRay. Tachyon was developed originally for supercomputers using (IIRC) the MPL API(?). With a Parallella you'll have your own supercomputer to develop on. Similarly the Parallella would make a good target for a Blender rendering backend. Be part of bringing a free software low cost high quality 3D animation solution to the world. Or maybe you'd like to work on a game engine and don't have an Intel GPU to do the physics OpenCL work in free software. Well at $99 Parallella is cheaper than a new Intel box and can be programmed in the standard for GPGPUs OpenCL. Adapteva has a white paper on using the processor for image manipulation. Ever fancied writing a really sick GIMP plug in? OTOH you could be a Maker and the idea of a robot with full vision capabilities gets you going? Or if you just want a computer to tell you who's at the door? I'm not quite up to robot vision. But, a long time friend who is a hardware design engineer is designing a small number of robots for an exhibit at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, UK (where Colossus the first electronic computer was built, they have a cool working recreation). He's kind of 'volunteered' me as a softie, and the Parallella looks to be the right free software thing for Mommy robot's 'branez.' Sure there are a lot of robot projects out there but this is distinct in that being an exhibit all the sensors and communication are going to be human perceivable. Robots talking in a musical language, audible 'sonar' etc. What are you thinking of using yours for gnufreeme? Andrew M. 'Leny' Lindley
