Why I love the parallella project

This week we've been coding the build for our next closed alpha test. Squashing bugs on the droid client, making serverside interestingness and little interfaces to easily manage testers and their groups. The droidside has got some nice power profiling and other things we need to know from our users.

Gps based games can be heavy on the battery if not done right so we're trying to find a sweet spot of power consumption versus reliability. Luckily, the power profiling info on android devices is standard over the platform which means we haven't managed to get anything but zeroes on every single tested device. Hooray! Needs a bit of tweaking then.

So our player handset alpha needs more work, maybe during the weekend we'll get the test version together plus a few tools to analyze the output. The player manual is done so when we have a reliable build, we're ready for another bigger multiplayer test.

For my personal distraction, I have been keeping an eye on the Parallella project. The Gen1 boards are almost ready to ship to kickstarter backers it seems. There are some really clever people on the forum and it's really interesting to follow what they're up to. Andreas Olofsson and the rest of the Adapteva staff are actively participating and navigating the conversation in a nice manner. Nerd rage occurs but doesn't escalate, even N00BS are being dealt with kindness. The forum is one of the best I've followed.

Because of my atari ST demoscene backround, I'm interested of projects that give the epiphany chip a proper trashing. This guy called Notzed is tinkering with Viola-Jones facial recognition algorithm and making really nice progress. Every clock cycle counts here. The strict memory restrictions of the chip and parallelism makes the coder think carefully about what he has to do, I like that. I hope Parallella will trigger an assembly revival among programmers, assembly can be so much fun, you should try it sometime.

So the lesson learned for me is having a great forum totally contributes to the project's success. Cannot wait to get my hands on the board and some free time to mess around with it.

Hmm. Begeistert, the Haiku-Os developer gathering happening next week. Would love to be there but doesn't look likely this year either. Uh oh.

Back to programming!

Sami
Hastur

Helped to build a play set the other day

are those lazers?

another interesting location found playing hoodo