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SparkFun Works to Build the Edison Ecosystem (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the more-tiny-electronics-for-makers-and-builders-to-make-and-build-with dept.

Edison is an Intel creation aimed squarely at the maker and prototype markets. It's smaller than an Arduino, has built-in wi-fi, and is designed to be used in embedded applications. SparkFun is "an online retail store that sells the bits and pieces to make your electronics projects possible." They're partnering with Intel to sell the Edison and all kinds of add-ons for it. Open source? Sure. Right down to the schematics. David Stillman, star of today's video, works for SparkFun. He talks about "a gajillion" things you can do with an Edison, up to and including the creation of an image-recognition system for your next homemade drone. (Alternate Video Link)

5 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Power Consumption by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 2

    All those bells and whistles come at a cost. The Edison draws about 10x as much power as an Arduino. Much more capable to be sure, but at a cost.

    --
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    1. Re:Power Consumption by nedwidek · · Score: 2

      Thanks for the link. I knew power would not be a pretty issue, but the other one that came to mind was whether you could count on instruction timing. That article confirms that you can't. The WS2811 and other such chips expect pretty tight timing. Simple to do with Arduino, just use the asm macro to directly do a string of NOP and then bit operators directly on the port register you've connected your data line to.

      Now if you're doing something that you need a beast like this for, you can hook up an Arduino or two and just use i2c to communicate. (Then again, in many cases a Due would be good enough).

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    2. Re:Power Consumption by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's not a 32-bit processor, it's 64-bit.

      Well.. technically there is a 32-bit processor, but that's in addition to the dual core 64-bit processor.

    3. Re:Power Consumption by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

      That's why you run the OS (like linux) on the Atom CPU and do your real time interfacing on the Quark CPU that's designed to run an RTOS.

      Just like how the BeagleBone Black has an ARM CPU and a little PRU

      by the way, if you need to do precise timing, you should probably be using a hardware timer. That way you can sleep the device or change the clock to save power instead of burning up power at full speed in a NOP.

  2. Edison missing a lot by SethJohnson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ok. I have mostly been working with Beaglebone and looked at this video to see what I might be missing with Edison. The shill in the video promotes Edison by saying it has all these things built in-- wifi and bluetooth.

    From this video, it's clear the board is missing USB and any kind of normal power connector. Oh, and removable storage? And ethernet?

    This device screams of a scheme to dump atom processors after the market disappeared for netbooks and intel was left with a few million chips on their hands. I'll stick with ARM and the larger ecosystem that has grown around the Beaglebone Black and Rpi, thank you.

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