Introduction
It is more than a month I got this tiny compute module of Intel called Intel Edison which is slightly larger than an SD card. After playing around Edison extensively I am completely in love with this tiny computer. The specialty of Edison is – It can be used for wearables, also it is enough powerful to control robots. It is a 35.5 × 25.0 × 3.9 mm module also equipped with Yocto, a Linux OS. It has onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, perfect for IoT projects. We can connect to Edison remotely and can run commands or access the file system. This gives lots of flexibility to developers via SSH. Its specs will definitely impress you, they are:
Specs
Figure 1: Intel Edison Board
- Intel® Atom™ Processor clocked at 500MHz
- 100MHz Quark MCU
- 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM
- 4GB eMMC flash memory
- WiFi (802.11a/b/g/n)
- Bluetooth (4.0 and 2.1 EDR),
- UARTs
- I2C
- SPI
- USB
- 40 multiplexed GPIO interfaces
Programming Methods
Edison can be used with Arduino IDE but to get most out of it you can use other programming languages such as Python, Node.JS, C/C++. Intel has its own IDE called Intel XDK IoT edition which makes programming with Edison easy. While setting up the programming environment for Edison you can choose between Arduino IDE, Intel XDK or Eclipse.
Prototyping with Edison
To keep the Edison small all of the I/O pins are broken out to a 70-pin Hirose connector. This 70 pin connector is not prototyping-friendly. Interfacing with these connectors is really difficult so to interface with Edison we need a board with mating Hirose connector.
Currently available interfacing boards are:
- Arduino Expansion Board
- Mini Breakout Board
- SparkFun Edison Blocks
If you are new to Edison and wanted to play around it, Arduino Expansion Board is for you. It will give you Arduino like feel also Arduino based shield are compatible with this board but slightly larger than Intel Galileo. Here are the features:
Figure 2: Arduino Expansion Board
Vignesh ManiPosted May 27, 2016, 4:20 PM
Good one
Sr KarthigaPosted Jan 23, 2016, 5:55 AM
Good one
Nilesh JadavPosted Sep 19, 2015, 1:31 AM
Great Post !!
Harshad PansuriyaPosted Sep 18, 2015, 6:45 AM
Nice One
Rajeesh MenothPosted Sep 17, 2015, 1:10 PM
Good One Pooja Baraskar
Afzaal Ahmad ZeeshanPosted Sep 17, 2015, 10:15 AM
That is interesting, yes I did know that Arduino etc have a very conserved amount of RAM and others which makes them suitable for electronics as they turn on as soon as current flows but Pi2 or other with more RAM and an OS take like 10 seconds to boot. Well, thanks for your experience girl. Thank you for explaining it in bits. :-) Appreciated!
Santhakumar MunuswamyPosted Sep 17, 2015, 10:04 AM
Good Article. Thanks for sharing
Pooja BaraskarPosted Sep 17, 2015, 8:22 AM
Good question Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan, many beginners gets confused about that and go for Arduino but for me Arduino for IoT is a complete no no. Yeah sometimes it can look cool with your simple application, but when you go in real life it wont work that way. Both are microcontrollers, Arduino is suitable for Electronics projects as it has a very less RAM and flash memory which are 2KB and 32KB and 16MHz CPU, the most powerful Arduino Due has 84MHz CPU while Intel Edison and Intel Galileo are mini computers. Edison runs on Linux and has 1GB RAM , 4GB flash memory and Intel Atom Processor. Arduino is there from around 3 years, it has given lot of flexibility to students to develop their own prototypes as earlier it was not that much easy but for IoT based applications we need a faster processor and a decent RAM and memory therefore IoT based boards like Edison and Galileo came in scenario. Lets take an Example if you have to send some important message or data to cloud in every second or minute like you are monitoring something or controlling something remotely, Use Edison or Galileo, Pi2 or other boards from same category but if you are doing the same with Arduino it wont work out. If we are sending a lot of data in real life projects it wont able to handle that. It is nice to learn with Arduino but for real life projects you can't go long with it. It is not for IoT.
Mahesh ChandPosted Sep 17, 2015, 8:12 AM
Nice Pooja. Yes I was curious, so there are two boards from Intel now? What is the difference and why one should choose one over other?
Afzaal Ahmad ZeeshanPosted Sep 17, 2015, 7:39 AM
One thing I don't understand, what is the difference between Arduino and Edison? Perhaps the same of their kind? Pooja Baraskar can you highlight the difference? :-)
Sibeesh VenuPosted Sep 17, 2015, 6:19 AM
Nice Share
Muhammad Aqib ShehzadPosted Sep 17, 2015, 5:45 AM
great article
Ankit BansalPosted Sep 17, 2015, 4:31 AM
thanks for share..
Pankaj BajajPosted Sep 17, 2015, 4:14 AM
Gud one Pooja and Thanks for sharing
Harshad PansuriyaPosted Sep 17, 2015, 3:13 AM
Nice One