
AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Computer - luu
http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/AppleCrateII.html
======
jacquesm
I really love this. I made a similar thing back in 2000:

[http://www.clustercompute.com/](http://www.clustercompute.com/)

We had landed a job to compress tens of thousands of CDs to mp3 for a dutch
broadcasting corporation and doing it on a single machine would have taken
years at the speed mp3 compressors were running in those days (Fraunhofer
reference code).

Doing it on this stack of boards got the job done in under two months.

Nowhere near as just-because-I-can as the linked article though.

------
artlogic
For those interested in a video demonstration:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrQJxCDrfrY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrQJxCDrfrY)

~~~
chippy
Thanks! He's hooked up the Applecrate I and II to make it into a 25 machine
ubercrate

------
joshu
Sorta tempted to do something similar in arduino-land to solve a processing
problem I am having...

~~~
sitkack
Use a
[http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/STMicroelectronics/STM32...](http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/STMicroelectronics/STM32F4DISCOVERY/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMutVogd4PRSvEN8XDBeCtgD)
instead of arduino, 192k of ram and a floating point unit.

~~~
joshu
Floating point is exactly the problem. I am building a balancing robot.

What's the tool chain like?

~~~
zwieback
I've used the Keil IDE, which is free for small projects. Takes some getting
used to but great debugger and easy to get started.

There's also free Eclipse/gcc toolchains so if you're already used to Eclipse
that's an easy way to get started.

All the newer ST demo boards have on-board JTAG debuggers so they're a little
bigger but convenient since you just need a USB cable. External JTAG debuggers
are pretty cheap and Keil (ARM) has a super-nice trace probe if you're willing
to spend a little more.

------
alien3d
cool. )

