Demand Peripherals
Robotics and Automation Made Easy
The Demand Peripherals peripherals and interface cards make it
easy to build a Linux based robot or other automation. Our
key difference is that our system is complete. That is, it
includes the hardware, firmware, and API software so your
Linux application can directly control the peripherals.
No more buying cards from SparkFun or Adafruit and having to
write all of the software layers up to your application.
The API is ASCII commands over a TCP connection. This means
you can write your Linux application in almost any programming
language: C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, or Python. We even have
BASH wrappers around the commands so you can program or test
your automation from the commands line.
An FPGA is at the core of the Demand Peripherals system. An
FPGA's flexibility means that we don't have to determine
which peripherals to put on your controller, You do!
The FPGA card has four connectors that can connect to eight
interface cards. Connect the interface cards, load the FPGA
image, start the API daemon, and you're set to go. Select
your interface cards from the list
here, and select the peripherals to
control those cards from the list
here.
The picture to the right shows a Baseboard4 FPGA card, a six
digit LCD, card, and a quad relay card. A Y-cable connects
the two cards to one connector on the FPGA card. A set of
four Y-cables is included with the Baseboard4.
Changing peripherals is easy. Just go to the support page Build Your FPGA Image, select your new periperal set, tell us where to email the FPGA image and press Submit. The email address associated with your purchase of the FPGA card gives you access to the backend service that builds FPGA images. There is no limit on how many FPGA images you can request.
Demand Peripherals can dramatically improve your time-to-market
for new robots or other automation since there is no MCU
code to write and interface card schematics are open-source.
The design cycle for building a microcontroller based robot
is eight to twelve months just to get to the point that you
can start writing the high-level Linux application. The
problem is that you usually have to start from scratch for
the circuit design and all of the MCU code.
A typical workflow when using Demand Peripherals is to build
a prototype using our off-the-shelf cards. This prototype
will be API complete and ready for use by the high level
application programmers. Once the application is underway
on the prototype hardware you can have your electrical engineers
collect the DPI schematics and arrange them on one board
and start the board layout and fabrication. The advantage
in this approach is there is no MCU firware to write
and you can have an API complete prototype in a week.
Buying a Baseboard4 FPGA card gives you a license to use an
FPGA image on Baseboard4. However when building your own FPGA
card you will need to purchase a license to use the peripherals
in a Demand Peripherals FPGA image. This license costs seventy-five
hundred dollars and includes the following:
- Ability to distribute the FPGA image
- Non Creative Commons use of the schematics
- Non GPL use of the dpserver source code
- License for the patent pending circuit of the ESPI
- Five hours of telephone support
Need help with the schematic capture and board layout? Let us know. Demand Peripherals can help build your prototypes.
A detailed description of the system operation and architecture can be found here.
A list of the peripherals and their descriptions can be found here.
A list of interface cards can be found here.
A complete description of the API can be found here.
You can specify and build a custom FPGA image with your selection of peripherals here.