The primary things I’m interested in knowing right now are: What are the use cases for you? What problems does this solve? What can you do with this that you can’t do with existing gear? How far is your imagination taking you when considering a scriptable environment?
We haven’t made the decision yet, but we may also open source the software portion of the Orion modules (the VHDL/FPGA portion would be fixed.) This would make each module in the series a reprogrammable video DSP focused on whatever video processing is going on in the FPGA core (in the case of Memory Palace, for example, there is a hardware accelerated texture-mapping unit, colorspace converter, chroma/luma keyer and alpha compositor.)
All of this stuff requires, at the least, clean code and documentation on our part. So we need to get through our first release cycles and let the firmware mature first. After that though, we may have a really great platform to springboard off of.
Check out the Pynq board… it’s a Python scriptable environment for Zynq (the architecture we’re using.) One option Ed’s brought up is to fork the Pynq platform and then implement device drivers for it for our various FPGA/DSP cores. That would provide a good basis for further extension.
Another selling point of a devboard is that it could be used as an OEM base for other people’s video synth/video mixer products – the same way we use the Raspberry Pi for our Andor 1 media player.