AXIOM Beta Hardware Update

Since the crowd funding campaign has started, there have been a number of quite interesting developments regarding AXIOM Beta and we thought it might be time to give you an update on the technical side.
The day after the campaign started, Avnet announced the PicoZed, which is basically a MicroZed with the minimum number of onboard components and interfaces, with a very interesting twist.

Now while the board itself wouldn't be very appealing for our project, the fact that it is also available with a Zynq Z-7015 which features four Multi-Gigabit Transceivers makes it quite interesting despite the fact that it requires us to add a number of interfaces and components ourself to make up for the reduction compared to the MicroZed.
As some of you might know, we also made good contact with the folks from Adapteva and they were so kind to send us four Parallella boards for testing (a big thanks here to all who were involved).

The Parallella board, besides a Zynq-7000 (Z-7010 or Z-7020), also features a 16-core Epiphany Multicore Accelerator, which integrates huge bandwidth and computing power in a very small package. One of the problems we identified early is the small number of available I/Os on the Zynq side, but after spending some time on thinking about it, we believe we found a viable solution for this as well.

So while we do not want to make any promises here, we believe that we can handle both very interesting alternatives to the MicroZed with a special solution, not as replacement for the MicroZed - which is still the best choice for a typical AXIOM Beta setup e.g. for shooting movies - but as addition to the AXIOM Beta variety we envision for development and experimentation.

Last but not least a warm welcome to all the nice people from Magic Lantern who teamed up with us to make the AXIOM Beta even more awesome.