Hacker News Reader

Comment by adammunich | Hacker News Reader

Never seen an Edison or Curie in the wild.

I was never able to find an Edison, but did find a curie however it seems they have given up on it since their big marketing campaign. you can buy the dev boards but I found it impossible to find a price or supply for the soc itself. also the quark processor that powers it apparently has a segfault with the only workaround being disabling lock, which presents a lot of issues for certain scenarios, specifically multi-threading.(https://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-22478) Not sure if that is related to their abandoning of the product line, if that is indeed the case. No idea what's going on. also worth noting, the actual SOC itself is significantly larger than all of the marketing pictures show it. Not sure if they used an alternate, cheaper form factor for the dev kit or what.

Damn I hadn't heard about that problem with the Quark. What I had heard was that it was notoriously difficult to get a hold of low level docs so that you could do anything serious with it (or was that the Curie or Edison?), which put me off trying their line up because all of the ARM Cortex stuff is pretty much open compared to them (CMSIS makes a lot of peripherals trivial to deal with compared to some of the mess that used to exist for ARM).

I don't think it was widely reported, but it was kind of a dealbreaker because it meant that existing x86 code simply wouldn't run and therefore it was impossible to use standard Linux distros or toolchains on the Quark. Between that, the difficulty of getting chips, the rather poor performance and power usage, and the complexity of integrating it, I think it was basically dead on arrival. The main thing Intel seemed to get out of it was a bunch of very favourable articles about how they'd be part of the Internet of Things revolution. The whole thing seemed ill-conceived; it was a 486 going up against modern RISC designs with predictable results.

Correct I could not find docs for the Curie to provide any insight into how everything worked, technically. I found some docs which contained a block diagram and saw the bluetooth module is a Nordic NRF51822. That package is a full Bluetooth stack as well as an arm cortex processor. I could not however determine how it was connected to the rest of the system, nor figure out if there was a way to get direct access to that arm cortex.

The Defcon badge had a Quark on it. It was pretty interesting.

? Amazon and the rest have them every day. WHen did you try last?

I've seen some Edison kits on the shelf at my local Fry's. Looks like they've been untouched for a long time.

I'm not really surprised. The quark co-processor was disabled in the devkit when it first launched. It took a year or so to get that cleared up and last I looked at the edison quark documentation wasn't great. That kinda killed what differentiated the devkit from yet another linux devboard. 5V IO on the first devkit also seems like an odd choice.

As a linux system-on-module, it doesn't seem badly priced for low quantities/one offs. Although for a little more you can get an arm SOM that has display capabilities.

Well, it's also Fry's, which in Chicago combines the excitement and inventory of a nice computer store with the anhedonic staff of your local DMV.

I have! The application would have been a much better fit for a CHIP, but I've nevertheless seen one.

I have personally made two prototypes for people using the Edison plus a the amazing add-ons from sparkfun. The integrated wifi and bluetooth are great, and once you are done setting it up, you end up with a battery stacked on an Edison, so a full blown computer with wifi and bluetooth you can switch on and stick anywhere you can fit two thumbs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com