Like anything else, this requires timing, and it's probably unsurprising to discover it's one part software and one part hardware. Or if an arm goes to grab a part and from another robot and it's not there, suddenly perfectly serviceable pieces are scattered about the environment. If an arm moving boards out of a soldering station moves too quickly while another robot is installing components, suddenly you end up with ruined parts and burned PCBs. The timing required to keep all of those operations in sync and moving as quickly as possible can be pretty overwhelming to ponder. Often times there are dozens of moving parts, robotic arms that move pieces around, other arms that are soldering surface-mounted components, packaging, and so on. Think about an automated (or even semi-automated) factory for a moment. Xilinx KR260: Multi-Node Real-Time Robotics Insert the SD card and hook up the necessary cables, and we're off to the races. As a result, getting up and running was as simple as downloading the Ubuntu image and using balenaEtcher to write the image to the included SD card. Unlike our experience with the KV260, however, our KR260 review units all came with the latest firmware out of the box ready for the latest Ubuntu image. The choice in Linux distributions is much the same as the KV260: Petalinux Embedded or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Desktop. Around the back of the board is a micro SD card slot used for running an embedded Linux distro. There's also a standard barrel connector for the included 12v power adapter. The back edge of the board also hosts four USB 3.0 headers and a DisplayPort output, both of which are necessary if you want to use the KR260 in a self-contained development environment as opposed to connecting it to a Linux PC running AMD Xilinx's Vitis development environment and tool chain. The other Ethernet controllers are still useful for things like internal network connectivity and communicating with the Internet. Industrial Ethernet supports an extra application layer that helps the systems sync up with incredibly precise timing - something that we can verify with an oscilloscope. Two of those ports are Industrial Ethernet ports, which will be important when we start talking about a network of industrial robots in a factory. On the other side we find four RJ-45 ports connected to four Gigabit Ethernet controllers. At the top edge, there's even a Raspberry Pi-compatible GPIO header. There's also the standard micro-USB port for things like COM port communication with a host (typical in embedded systems) that also doubles as a USB JTAG header. Manufacturing sensitive components requires a controlled environment, and when combined with an array of temperature and humidity sensors, the KR260 can be quite the useful controller. Next to that we find four 12-pin Pmod interfaces which are used to connect sensors. On one edge we find a SFP+ port that can accept a 10 Gbps Ethernet adapter. When we get to the daughterboard, you'll see the KR260 is vastly different from its sibling. The quad-core Arm Cortex A53 cluster and 4 GB of DDR4 memory are still present, too, but as before they're mostly there to tell the FPGA what to do, not to be a primary processor. Along with all the camera interfaces and USB IO we mentioned before, there's also up to 40 Gigabits of Ethernet connectivity, split four ways. This time, however, we have to focus on a different set of IO. The specs here haven't changed much it's still got the same 256,000 programmable logic cells with upwards of 1.4 TOPS of processing horsepower. We'll get to that all in due time, of course, but first let's take a tour of our entrant for today.Īs we said earlier, the star of the show is the K26 SoM, which is based on AMD Xilinx's Zynq UltraScale+ architecture. With the KR260, the applications are just as practical, and perhaps even more critical for our daily lives, but maybe not quite as visual. With image recognition in the KV260 and adorable AI-powered tour guides, like we saw with NVIDIA's Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit, the benefits are readily apparent and easy to demonstrate. This time the focus is on industrial robotics, which makes our job a little harder. The KR260 uses the same K26 SoM as the KV260, but trades out all the camera IO for networking controllers and sensor inputs. At the time, the KR260 Robotics Starter Kit had also been freshly announced, but wouldn't be available until later. However, it was easy to see that the setup had a lot of promise with a potent FPGA, a solid foundation of good development tools, and plenty of IO. At the time, we found the experience to be a bit rough around the edges. Last summer, we got to go hands-on with AMD Xilinx's KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit, which combined the company's K26 System-on-a-Module (SoM) with a daughterboard that had copious IO for image recognition AI.
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