Computação paralela, ligações desalinhadas, e Laser CNC da China

Da Designspark, vêem-nos notícias frescas da já anteriormente mencinada Paralella, uma placa para Computação Paralela a preço acessível:

A Parallella Update

Andrew Back

As the first Parallella beta boards arrive this post takes a look at recent project developments.
There has been a great deal of progress since I last wrote about Parallella back in January, and what follows is a selection of milestones and highlights from over the past three months.

Zynq SoC upgrade

Initial board layout and expansion details were provided in a blog post on February 10th, which also included the exciting news that thanks to a generous offer from Xilinx, Kickstarter boards will use a Zynq-7020 instead of a Zynq-7010. An upgrade which in terms of programmable logic provides:

• 28,000 → 85,000 logic cells

• 240KB → 560KB block RAM

• 80 → 220 DSP slices

This means that there will be yet more scope for implementing interfaces and “glue logic” for daughter cards, and even custom and special purpose additional coprocessors.
It is planned that the Zynq 7020 upgrade will be available as an option for post-Kickstarter orders.

http://www.designspark.com/eng/blog/a-parallella-update

Da Inventables, como novidade, vem-nos esta Ligação que permite transmitir um movimento de rotação entre dois eixos desalinhados:

     Flexible Coupler

Connect shafts together with lateral misalignment

Clamp lock style flexible motor coupler. Made from aluminium to reduce inertia. The clamp lock provides an extremely tight grip without marring the shaft. The coupler also includes grub screws for shaft flats.

https://www.inventables.com/technologies/flexible-coupler

E já pensaram comprar uma Maquina de corte CNC, mas mais barata?

Eis, da Hackaday, um exame a uma, Made in China, a 2500 dólares, com envio!

Para a além da análise, leiam também os comentários...

Buying a Laser Cutter From China

Jesse Congdon

We here at Hackaday have been pining over these cheap laser cutters on the e-bay. They are, however, just outside of the price range to make them worth ponying up for.  [Stephen Hobley] however seems to have taken one for the team in his three part series, and is allowing us to live vicariously through is experiences.

Not surprisingly the price point leads to the potential for headaches. The units ship directly from China, and see their fair share of rough handling from package carriers. Broken/misaligned laser tubes are not uncommon (replacement tubes are prevalent). Shockingly the laser tube managed to survive the seven thousand mile journey! That only leaves a couple crucial modifications and careful cleaning and aligning to get the unit up and running. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?

To top off all the modifications adjustments and cleaning steps [Stephen] found (in part three) that his controller board was on the fritz. With a new one on the way from China, [Stephen] is debating either reverse engineering the included controller board or coming up with his own CNC solution. We could suggest quite a few alternate solutions ourselves.

We will be glued to [Stephen]‘s blog for updates.

http://hackaday.com/2011/04/14/buying-a-laser-cutter-from-china/