

Aijuboard – A Computer Based on the Zynq-7000 SoC with FPGA Running Plan 9 - jpm9
https://www.indiegogo.com/at/aijuboard

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deutronium
You can also run Plan 9 on the Raspberry Pi, apparently -
[http://www.plan9.bell-
labs.com/wiki/plan9/raspberry_pi/](http://www.plan9.bell-
labs.com/wiki/plan9/raspberry_pi/)

The Aijuboard has lots of cool features like non-usb full gigabit ethernet
though.

I'm also curious of the kind of things you could do with the FPGA too.

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rjsw
Why not just port Plan 9 to a Parallella board ?

They do plan to have SATA which isn't on any other Zynq dev board AFAIK, this
will require some FPGA work as it isn't provided by the SoC.

~~~
eekee
The point was for this one guy (aiju) to see if he could design and build a
whole working computer. If I could afford one, I'd get one as much for the
purpose of supporting heroic individual effort -- I witnessed some of his
struggles -- as for any other reason.

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imrehg
I'm surprised that they have a hard limit of maximum of 10 boards and set
their campaign funding threshold to be exactly that. This, together with the
very high $100-no-real-reward-minimum-contribution definitely stops it to be a
more than "an okay success" even if the funding goal is met.

Not that people are aren't allowed to do thing the way they want, just it's
unusual. Makes me guess it can be a project where they already know mostly who
the contributors will be. But then why go through crowdfunding and their cuts,
instead of a simple site and a payment button?

~~~
eekee
The hard limit is to do with practicalities of low-volume production when
you're not sure if enough people will buy them. All ten boards need to be
funded (one way or another) for production to go ahead at all.

Another practicality is the EU's draconian electronics-approval laws. The USA
exempts prototypes from approval, but the EU doesn't. The board designer is
German, so EU laws mean he can't legally sell or even give away these boards
himself, unless he first sinks thousands of dollars and more time than he
spent on the board itself into regulatory paperwork. That's the reason it's on
IndieGoGo at all; He needed a USA resident to both handle the financing and
get the board produced all within the USA. IndieGoGo was the least bad
financing option he found.

~~~
imrehg
Interesting, do you have any pointers for me regarding these laws? I know that
it's a very complex (and complicated, and misunderstood) area of making
things. Would expect that such things would bite e.g. sellers on Tindie very
soon too. I'm also an EU citizen, though living in Asia, trying to figure out
how these rules work for hardware the open source hardware and prototypes I
make.

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lfam
> 1 GB of RAM (can be configured as 512 MB of error-corrected RAM instead)

Can this be done in Linux?

~~~
rjsw
It is a feature of the DDR controller in the Zynq SoC so it could be done for
any OS.

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jpm9
New perks added!

