We wanted to give you an update on the status of shipping based upon the latest information that we have received from our MFG. We are sorry for the MFG/shipping process dragging out. Unfortunately, we have not had control of this end of the process and have done our best to push the process along with our MFG. We have been told that all the boards will ship on Thursday June 5th!
Shipping status for all LOGI Boards is as follows.
LOGI-Cam Orders
All orders with LOGI-Cam boards are now ready to ship and will be shipped onThursday June 5.
LOGI-Pi Orders
All orders with LOGI-Pi boards are now ready to ship and will be shipped onThursday June 5.
LOGI-Bone Orders
All orders with LOGI-Bone boards are now ready to ship and will be shipped onThursday June 5.
LOGI-EDU Orders
All orders with LOGI-EDU boards are now ready to ship and will be shipped onThursday June 5.
AVC update
As you know we have been gearing up for the 2014 Sparkfun AVC. We have just submitted a video with one of our LOGI-UGV cars assembled and running that we used as a proof of concept video for our Sparkfun entry. You can see a newly designed LOGI-UGV 3d printed “pod” which houses the LOGI-Pi, Raspberry Pi, LOGI-Cam, GPS, MPU-9150 and 3 ultrasonic ping sensors. We are integrating the working drivers for the sensors and will be optimizing the top level implementations for the AVC on June 21. We will be hosting all of the drivers and code on our github repository.
If you have ideas for functionality and or would like to get involved, drop by the forums and bring up any relevant discussions.
Hummingboard LOGI-Pi Integration
We just received a Hummingboard that is footprint compatible with the Raspberry Pi. We will be working on creating functionality for the Hummingboard and the LOGI-Pi. Here are some pictures of the LOGI-Pi and Hummingboard.
Cheers,
The LOGI-Team
Updated shipping dates
We have been communicating with our MFG to see what options are currently available for shipping. Unfortunately, there are still some snags with the LOGI-EDU and the LOGI-Bone, which they state are being worked out. They have struggled to acquire all of the final parts needed for the LOGI-EDU and the LOGI-Bone. They are in the final stages of the completion for the LOGI-Cam and the LOGI-Pi Boards.
The most recent dates for shipping given to us from our MFG:
- LOGI-Pi Ready for shipping on Monday May 19
- LOGI-Cam Ready for shipping on Monday May 19
- LOGI-Bone Expected to ship by end of May
- LOGI-EDU Expected to ship by end of May
For those that are LOGI-Pi and LOGI-Cam backers, your packages will be shipping starting monday May 19. For those backers whose packages contain LOGI-EDU and or LOGI-Bone, the shipping will begin at the end of May (based upon the latest information received from the MFG - hope it sticks!).
We are sorry for the delay and acknowledge that we have indeed fallen prey to some of the pitfalls and timelines for MFG. We are learning and hope to continue to improve based on our experiences. We hope to make up for this in the long run and hope that you are happy with the boards.
We will ask that the MFG ship the boards with some extra packaging to ensure that they do not get damaged during shipping. We have been informed by some of the earlybird users that the boxes received had taken a pretty good beating, though the boards were intact.
Skeleton Editor - Graphical HDL Editor update
We have continued our effort in developing an easy-to-use graphical HDL editor that will allow users to easily create their customized HDL projects using the LOGI drivers. You can access and experiment with the skeleton editor at the following link. We have created a new video with a walk through and overview of the editor at the following link. Additionally there is a new wiki page with the step by step guide of creating your own HDL projects using the Skeleton Editor
- LOGI-Pi Skeleton Editor
- LOGI-Bone Skeleton Editor
- Skeleton Editor wiki guide and documentation
- Skeleton Editor Youtube Video Overview and walk through
Sparkfun AVC 2014 Status Update - LOGI-UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle)
We are hard at work to get a vehicle ready to participate in the Sparkfun AVC 2014. Our latest work target the next two topics following with an overview.
- GPS Waypoint Navigation
- FPGA-based PID controller
The LOGI-UGV software will be entirely programmed in python, which requires that we find a simple (yet efficient) way to navigate GPS waypoints without performing heavy/complicated arithmetic. State of the art waypoint navigation methods either work by extracting bearing and distance directly from GPS data or by converting GPS and waypoint data into a linear Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) space. One advantage of using the UTM space is that you can then work directly on X,Y coordinates. Unfortunately, the conversion from GPS (NMEA) data to the UTM space is quite complicated. Therefore the approach we have chosen is to consider the plan tangent to the earth sphere at the course coordinates. For small distances (The AVC course fits in a 60x60m area) the curvature of the earth can be neglected.
The conversion from the GPS coordinates (NMEA) to these local coordinates only requires two subtraction and two multiplication instructions (plus the conversion from degree-minute to degree-decimal) thanks to the small angle approximation of the sine function. All these approximations give a small error for the course area, and these errors will be absorbed by the GPS positioning error (3m at best).
The AVC course Waypoints.kml file plotted in the local coordinates system
To navigate the LOGI-UGV, we plan to use the FPGA not only to generate control signals (PWM for motor and servo) and read sensor (GPS, sonar, gyro) but also to manage high-rate PID control for the speed control and maybe steering control (using gyro). PID control on the motor will help us to position the robot and drive it at a precise pace. The PID logic is already implemented using information athttp://crap.gforge.inria.fr/doc2.php (its in french, but google translate should work fine) and we have a rather simple encoder reading logic. We improved the encoder reading logic to get better accuracy and to be more error prone. This PID logic and encoder logic will first be tested using a standalone motor with encoder connected to the LOGI board and will then be adapted to the AVC platform with homemade hall effect encoders.
LOGI-Bone Kernel integration of LOGI-Tools
After some work, the LOGI-Bone Tools support has made its way into the official beaglebone(black) kernel patch list. If you go to https://github.com/RobertCNelson/linux-dev and have a look at the patch folder of the am33x-v3.8 branch you’ll see all the logibone related patches. This means that the LOGI-Bone support will be integrated in the future official debian/ubuntu images! For the early-bird adopters, following the information on the wiki page (http://valentfx.com/wiki/index.php?title=Logi-Bone_Quick_Start_Guide#First_boot_of_the_logi-image_-_auto_setup_device-tree) will setup the cape identification EEPROM so that the kernel module and device-tree configuration can be loaded at boot time.
HummingBoard compatibility
A new very powerful development board will hit the market soon (http://imx.solid-run.com/wiki/index.php?title=HummingBoard_Hardware) and its designers chose the Raspberry-Pi form factor and Raspberry-Pi expansion port layout! The board sports a quad-core IMX.6 Freescale processor, 2GB or RAM, SATA, Gigabit ethernet, USB, HDMI … which should give plenty of computation power and IO to drive the most demanding applications. We are waiting to get a sample of this board and hope to soon list the Humming board in our support list for the LOGI-Pi board.
Thanks for your continued support and we look forward to helping your get up to speed with using the LOGI Boards soon! As always feel free to drop us a line at support@valentfx.com or drop by and say hi on our new forums forum.valentfx.com.
Cheers,
The LOGI-Team
We wanted to give you an update regarding the MFG process for final kickstarter and pre-order boards. As well, we have some updates of progress with regard to our forums, wiki and code repository.
Delay with MFG based on some parts sourcing conflicts
We had great hopes of being able to ship late April (Now). Unfortunately, our MFG has let us know that they have hit a couple of snags in parts sourcing and thus there will be a minor delay in the boards being shipped. We have been given a new date of May 15 for the final LOGI boards to begin shipping. We are very sorry about any inconvenience this may cause. Thanks for your patience and support in this learning experience!
Difference between Early Bird and regular backers
There have been questions about how to figure out if you are an Early bird backer (MFG Run1 - early shipping) or standard backer (MFG Run2 - Shipping Mid May) and figuring out when your boards will ship.
The plan was have 2 stages of MFG. MFG#1 was for a small run of LOGI boards (100xLOGI-Pi and 100xLOGI-Bone). The purpose of MFG#1 was to test the MFG process with our MFG to determine if there were going to be any problems before we ran MFG#2 (all the rest of the boards). Reduce risk of a very large “oops”.
There were only a limited number of "Early Adopter or Early Bird" boards that were available. The Early Bird pledge levels were the first to go and filled up quickly for MFG#1. All the rest of the boards were slotted for MFG#2. The other way of distinguishing between MFG#1 and MFG#2 is the "Estimated delivery" dates that are listed under each pledge level. March or April, Where MFG#1=late March and MFG#2 = late April (now mid May).
Forum
We have setup our forum at forum.valentfx.com. We are still getting things tuned,but they are functional and you can begin receiving support, talking to each other, sharing your great thoughts and ideas! So please drop by and say hello! We are working on implementing some features such as a point system and badges with given rewards such as free logi boards for active and helpful users. Let us know as you have further ideas for features that you would like to see in the forum.
Wiki
We are also actively working on adding to our wiki content for drivers, software, projects and everything else you need to know. We hope to create full and thorough documentation for the logi boards. Wiki’s allow for living documentation and we hope to keep up to date with helpful information. Please give us feedback on what you see and missing or as you see errors. As well, we are happy to give you full access to the wiki to add your own content of to help is fixing up our. This is a great way to get “points” for getting your free promotional logi boards.
Repository Structure - "logi-projects-packed"
We have also been cleaning and re-structuring our repository on github to make it as easy to use as possible. We have partitioned the different types of repo elements by putting them into separate repositories such as hardware, tools, projects, boards, mechanical, etc. There are pros and cons including the possibility of the repositories getting out of sync with each other and having to run a “pull” to each separately to get them back into sync. This has especially been a problem with the logi-projects repository as the projects are dependent on these external repositories and if they are not up to date the projects will not build properly.
We have added a separate repository for the logi-projects called logi-projects-packed (for packaged). The packed repo creates a snapshot of the known working state of the given projects and pulls all external references to the project into a single archived directory. This guarantees that the project will be successfully be built and there will be no build conflicts as drivers and other external references are updated. You can checkout the new packed projects README file for more information and to explore the projects.
Have ideas/thoughts on the repository? Drop by the forums and drop us a line in note.forum.valentfx.com
Getting your LOGI Images all ready to go
We have created updated pre-configured logi images that contain all of the logi-tools and logi-apps that will allow to you most effectively get start using the LOGI boards with the RPi and BBB. See specific information about the LOGI images for the Rpi and BBB in the wiki documentation. Additionally here are direct downloads for the images for you to get started with.
LOGI-Pi Logi-Image details and Download link
LOGI-Bone Logi-Image details and Download link
Have further thoughts and suggestions? Drop by the forum (beta) and let us know!
Cheers,
The LOGI-Team
Just a few note to ensure that you are all set to have your boards shipped and that you are ready to use the board when it gets to you.
1) if you if have not given us your phone numbers please click the following link to input it into a form for us. In case you missed the last update, phone numbers are required for shipping the boards.
2) Only the earlybird boards have shipped. If you are not an early bird backer your board will be shipping at the end up April. Stay tuned and thanks for your patience.
Status on shipping of Earlybird boards
There have been many questions about when the early bird boards will be showing up. We have been told that it can take up to 15 days for delivery depending on the country being delivered to. It is possible for further delays if there is conflict with customs, which there should not be. Our drop shipper was careful about the labeling of the “electronics development board” and have kindly set an optimal “value” for any import taxes. So for early bird users, hang in there and give it some time.
Pictures of the Early Bird Boards!
There are some happy users that have gotten their boards and are up and running! Some of them got their boards before we did - Lucky Ducks! We did get our early bird boards and they are beautiful! Our MFG has done an exceptional job on the first MFG run. Here are some pictures fo the MFD’d boards.
Status of MFG for the rest of the Boards
Our MFG is underway to MFG all the rest of the boards. We are still on track for the large MFG run to be complete at the end of April when we will ship all of the remaining boards.
Get Familiarized with the Wiki documentation
We are hard at work getting our wiki filled in with all of the information that you will need to get started and to work with the applications and drivers. Now would be a good time for you to have a look at the quickstart guides that will get you up running with all the information you need.
LOGI-Board documentation on the wiki
PREPARE TO INSTALL XILINX ISE Webpack
Probably the biggest hassle of setting up to use the FPGA is getting a hold of the ISE install files. The download size is about 6GB. If you do not have internet bandwidth to support this download you can request to have a DVD sent to you directly from Xilinx. I don’t know how long this shipping takes, so it’s a safe bet to request your DVD now.
If you see any errors or have suggestions for improvement please let us know!
The LOGI-Team
Glen riding on the Monarch Crest Trail near Salida, Colorado, August 2013.
Glen is not a bragger, but we are impressed through and through with his impressive work history, experience and awesome projects. We are especially grateful when such highly qualified professionals are willing to share their wisdom with all of us!
Glen’s background
Glen Akins is an electrical engineer with 20 years of ASIC, FPGA and embedded design experience working on cutting edge applications including DSP, cryptography, networking, RF modulation and demodulation, digital audio, and embedded programming. Glen has worked for big name companies such as Agilent, Cisco and Scientific Atlanta.
Glen has brought his broad set of skill sets to the hacker and hobby space and created some very unique, creative, and educational projects. Glen is an advocate of open source hardware and collaborative design and thus has done a great of amount of work to formalize documentation, create videos and guides for his projects that allows users to re-create, expand, modify and learn from from his current work and projects.
Glen goes to full distance with his projects, not just hacking things together, but hacking them together with style and robustness in mind. In the end Glen’s projects usually have a nicely designed PCB and final enclosure that houses the sick functionality of his projects and gives them a long term home.
Glen’s current RGB LED panel arrays for Utility and Artistic purposes
For starters have a look at his LED project in action You can follow up with some of the details below and/or on Glen’s Blog with LED panel part #1 and LED part #2 and his Hackaday Writeup!
Recently Glen has been working with 32x32 RGB LED panels to create some very artistic and creative visual panel arrays. In it’s simplest form Glen’s project drives a single or dual panels, which makes for a nice wall mount or desk visualizer. Expanding on upon this, Glen has taken the panels and put them into arrays including a 6x panel cube, 3x2 flat panel array. His project is highly modular and flexible allowing for many more configurations to be easily implemented. Listed is a summary of attributes of Glen’s LED panel project followed by an explanation of some of the features. Note that this is just a summary and for full details see the resources links below to understand the complete scope of the project. If you want to jump right to seeing the project in action see Glen’s project overview on youtube(single panel) or check out his full overview and documentation on his wiki page.
Glen's LED Panel Features
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Based on 32x32 RGB 8” x 8” square LED panels from Sparkfun
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Driven by a Beaglebone Black and LOGI-Bone FPGA expansion board
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The LED panels can currently be configured in 1 to 6 panel configurations
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Highly intensive visualization algorithms are driven using the BBB and FPGA to create a seamless visual display on a single panel or array of panels
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Highly expandable BBB and LOGI-Bone platform allow for further expansion to enhance and expand the current functionality or to customize the project to fill a specific need
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Mechanical fixtures and frames designed that allow for the panels to be place into large panel arrays. Design files and links for ordering are available so you can get your own.
The display controller consists of a BeagleBone Black and a LOGI-Bone FPGA board. Glen has written drivers for the beaglebone and FPGA and migrated libraries to support visualization algorithms including Perlin noise, many types of dynamic patterns and raw images. He has also ported text rendering libraries to display textual messages.
Glen has designed mechanical fixtures and frames that securely fixes the panel arrays together so that they can be used as permanent installations. There is a full parts list and mechanical files in Glen’s project repository and on his wiki page. Additionally there is facility to mount and power the displays with an external off the shelf power supply making this a solid standalone panel system. 3D printed brackets for assembling the cube are in the works and will be uploaded once the dimensions are verified.
Rumor has it that Glen has plans to hang the cubes from the ceiling to add ambient effects to the room. Talk about showing the disco ball how it’s done. As if the cube was not enough bling for one room, there is the option to put up single, dual or a 2x3 flat panel array on the wall for ambient visual effects or textual updates.
The LED panel project is based on architectures that are very expandable, which would allow many new types of applications to be added the this current base project. We foresee potential add-on functions such as bluetooth, or wifi networking to stream twitter, facebook, SMS text, email updates onto the screen. The addition of sensors or ADC inputs would be a nice addition as well. Sensor inputs would allow the system to analyze the ambient surroundings and dynamically change the effects based upon pre-determined standards. These types of functions would make for a great “smart” ambient visualizer. There are, oh so many, directions that this project could take.
We hope to take on some of this project’s tasks and to expand upon this great open source project by Glen. We thank him for his time and efforts in sharing, educating and making this project available to all of us. In “Glen style”, there is full documentation ranging from parts lists, theory of operation, tutorials on how to guides regarding the full implementation. Be sure to check out Glen’s great documentation of this project by checking out his twitter updates, youtube videos, google plus page, blog, code repositories and his project documentation on the ValentFX wiki.
Want to get involved in Glen’s project or other projects? We all have our own strengths and working in groups allows us to share those strengths. Very cool and widely diversified projects can be created when spreading the load of the project across a group of individuals, each with their own specialties and strengths. ValentFX wants to see these type of projects and applications come to fruition and would encourage users to work together to make these projects a reality. You can contact Glen if you would like to get involved in project. Or you can contact ValentFX if you would like to get involved in any of their projects. Have other ideas or suggestions for projects? Do you have a project you would like to get others involved in? Give us an email.
Checkout some of Glen’s other projects
360 Panorama Camera Built with GoPro Hero 2 Cameras (4 Cameras)
Android-contorlled Floorboard lighting for Glen’s jeep
MacBook + Altera FPGA driving the christmas light matrix
WiFi connection ambient display using retro-styled analog panel meters
There are some existing early version LOGi boards out in the wild being beta tested. Glen Akins has one of these early LOGi boards and has been putting it to good use.
Glen has come up some very artistic, clever and flashy projects using the LOGi-Bone and the BeagleBone Black. Glen was a recent winner in the third round #beagleboneblackcase contest hosted by Adafruit. Stay tuned for a full wiki page on Glen’s 32x32 LED panel project that will have everything you need to re-create the complete project. In the mean time have a look at his youtube channel to have a sneak peek at some of his great work. You can follow Glen’s past, current and future projects on his youtube channel, twitter or Github
ValentF(x) sees great potential when using FPGA and embedded CPU technology together. There are many great CPU/MCU based platforms currently available on the market with a wide base of users and potential applications. At some point in an embedded user’s electronics experience there will need to use the capability of an FPGA.
We have found that it is a great challenge to bridge the gap between using CPUs/MUCs, their associated languages, tools and compilers and using FPGAs with their associated languages, tools and compilers. These are the types challenges that Valent F(x) hopes to alleviate and to eventually create an inviting and even enjoyable gateway for CPU users to experience and become proficient in using FPGAs. We previously introduced the flexibility using LOGi virtual components as a tool when using FPGA and the Raspberry Pi together, we now would like to introduce another tool that we are working on that can potentially be a bridge that will allow CPU/MCU an easy way of creating, customizing and compiling hardware description language code without ever needing to write a line of code.
One of the challenges of working with FPGA’s is the very very very large tools required to be installed on your PC to build/compile your custom HDL projects for the FPGA to use. A second challenge is that many users who want to work with FPGAs are not ready to begin writing their own HDL code in order to create their own projects. We thought that it would be nice to come up with a solution to nip both of these issues in the bud. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to customize and a compile your project directly from your Pi or Bone? Wouldn’t it be great to customize and a compile your project without writing a line of HDL?
Introducing the “Skeleton” - Web Based Architecture HDL Editor/Compiler
With the LOGi-Boards we not only want to deliver a board to experience FPGA programming, but we also want to deliver the tools that will ease the user experience. Aside from the libraries of drivers, components and software libraries, we wanted to propose a novel approach to the design of FPGA architecture. Our architecture editor is web-based (nothing to install) and allows users to connect the components of the LOGi-library in a wishbone architecture. The architecture creation is performed by instantiating the components and dragging connection between them. The tool can then be used to generate a zip file containing the vhdl of the architecture, a Makefile to compile the architecture (linux only) and a .xise file that can be loaded as a project using Xilinx tools.
Aside from the architecture, we have designed a web-service that can be run on a local machine or on a server. This web-service can take the generated zip file and generate the FPGA configuration file using Xilinx tools. This allows users to edit an architecture directly on the Raspberry Pi/beaglebone and get the FPGA configuration file from the server. This could be used in a classroom or hackerspace context with only one PC on the network running Xilinx tools and people directly using their raspberry-pi/beaglebone to design an FPGA architecture.
This tool is still a work in progress but we validated the design flow up to the loading of the FPGA with the generated bit-file. There is still a lot to do to bring a hassle free experience (help from experienced javascript programmers could be useful) to the user but we are definitely on a good path. For those that have javascript and web development experience and would like to help, please contact us at support@valentfx.com.
Jonathan has put together a video overview of the GUI based HDL compilation process complete with loading the generated bitstream onto the FPGA from the Pi/Bone host after it is compiled in the “cloud”. Have a look at the video overview on the LOGi Youtube Channel.
Note that the Web compiler is strictly in beta at the moment and we have a lot of work to do before final implementation. One of our bigger concerns is that there may be complications in the terms of use of the Xilinx tools that would be running in the cloud. We will be working out these details and hope to have a nice solution for mainstream use soon.
For now you can experiment with the user beta user interface of the "Skeleton" Editor, customize an HDL project using the LOGi components using the GUI editor and export the corresponding HDL to your computer. Note that we do have a dedicated server which we are able to pass the generated HDL project and it compiles and returns a .bit file to load onto the FPGA. To pass the generated HDL project for the compilation process you would enter the "path to server" where the compilation tools are installed. We will need to work out potential terms of use licensing with Xilinx before we make this available to our users.
We are in the process of planning out how we will setup a LOGi community. We have seen the rise and fall of communities in the past and think that it is crucial that we get it right the first time. We are taking a close look at what seems to be working with other communities and hope to implement these within the LOGi community. We also hope to add features that help to promote user interaction, project sharing, collaboration,etc. Below are some attributes that we see as key for a successful and vibrant community. We certainly won’t be able to start with all of these attributes, but would like to create long term goals while starting with the essentials.
Potential attributes of a successful community
- Forum is mandatory.
- Look and feel must not be professional/elite/ (there are no dumb questions). Beginners must be welcomed and encouraged.
- Forum admin must encourage simple and helpful response. Users can vote for response usefulness.
- Forum admin must encourage simple and helpful response. Users can vote for response usefulness.
- Community main page would have daily content published.
- Simple and fun demo could be promoted, over complicated demo would be avoided.
- Community could have an identified lead team with people from different fields and different levels. Maybe one identified individual could lead the community
- Main community contributors would post educational video content with casual presenter behavior and casual environment (sparkfun "according to Pete", Ben heck show).
- Demo would focus on hot topics using FPGA : drone, 3d printer, robots ...
- Community would promote community driven development. Maybe introduce a concept of "workplace" a space where skills can meet. People would have skills listed in their profile to encourage people to team up on projects. People could post project and try to enroll people based on their skills.
- Propose monthly contests with small giveaways.
- Propose quiz with technical content and possibility for users to earn skill badges (badges could also be earned by answering to question on the forum).
- Host web apps for FPGA development (hdl simulator, schematic editor). Standardize development with easy to use interfaces and standardize software libraries.
Ultimately, you will be the ones who will be using the community, so you should be the ones who have say in how it is put together. Please email us your thoughts or suggestions in regard to how we go about this: support@valentfx.com.
Missed out on our Kickstarter? Not to worry you can pre-order your LOGi-Boards that will be MFD'd and shipped with the kickstarter boards. The ship date is anticipated to be in April 2014. All payment processing is done securely using trycelery.com.