The Intel Edison: Linux Maker Machine in a Matchbox
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What's Yocto and what are they doing wrong?
Bringing up the edison is very easy. The bootloader supports DFU, so you can simply connect USB, reset, and flash the system images.
If you're coming at it from a higher level, it has a node.js and ssh services running by default, so it's easy to start tinkering.
It's the way Intel dealt with whole thing, that makes me cringe. It's poorly organized and unaccustomed to any serious changes.
Never used it, but from what I see on embedded conference talks, it seems to be widely deployed.
Edison isn't supposed to be a hub; it's a lightweight and specialized piece of hardware that can be customized to travel and explore and communicate high-load (poll-heavy) data gathering situations to a hub. Having x86 in octopus tentacles that can efficiently communicate with the x86 hub brain (which is where your heavy OS/custom driver code should be stationed) means you actually can make pretty good use of the ecosystem, and create projects that can get real-time data online quickly.
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/13/raspberry-pi-and-windows-10-i...
> The makers will be able to download and use the first public release of Windows 10 IoT Core at no cost, although this require access to a "development machine" with Windows 10.
Can I have a Windows that is really a core (memory usage)? Can I flash it by the means of a simple 'dd'? Requiring a Windows to develop is a big no for many.
Probably to get automatic security updates so you don't have a million hacked IoT devices on your network...
If a firm is not willing to update my device anymore, why does an "automatically updated base" make me more safe? Without updates to the upper layers of the software stack I'm still vulnerable..
Is there a real advantage over Yocto plus un update mechanism such as rauc [https://github.com/rauc/rauc] or mender [https://github.com/mendersoftware/mender] ?
The real problem is lack of Intel's support. Edison runs an ancient kernel, the yocto image source is full of hacks, which do not suggest big interest in prolonging the device's actuality. Instead, Intel decided to add Arduino compatibility to a x86 Linux board, god knows why.
But this actually proves your larger point that Intel just aren't that interested. If they were, they would sell Edison at a loss for $5, which would spawn huge community support around them.
Intel they are suffering the classic innovator's dilemma, where competitors grab the low-end with products so cheap that no-one cares about their inferiority. The competitors then slowly improve their products (see the ESP32) and gobble up most of the market. Inel will rule the high end for a while yet, but I think they recognise they have already lost the low end.
It's 512 KB are more than enough for most applications.
After all it was enough for having MS-DOS, Turbo Pascal development environment back in the day, just as example.
This killed it for me. I have one through Hackster.io and the first two projects I attempted bogged down in "need to compile this common package from source and hack it up to try to get it working" land. Meanwhile on a Raspberry Pi the same packages are an apt-get away.
I've been asked many times why someone would choose an Edison and the best answer I have is "if you really, really need to use an Intel board" and even then there are better solutions from them.
The straw that broke the camel's a back was the connector between the Edison and the board. It is a nightmare for prototyping. It pretty much requires a pick'n'place to get it right.
Broken out headers for rapid development are a must in any device that claims to be for Makers.
There exists a breakout board for the Edison by Intel:
> https://www.arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCertified/IntelEdison#toc4
There also exists a kit with Arduino headers if this is what you prefer:
> https://www.arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCertified/IntelEdison#toc3
Unfortunately, a bit too pricey in comparison to the ARM ecosystem (the whole dev kit for the cheaper x550 variant is at $287 on newegg).
The post I was replying to was trying to claim the Pi family provides the same features for much less than the Edison. That isn't the case. The Pis that are cheaper than the Edison are also much less capable, and the Pis that can match the Edison in features and performance cost as much or more than it does.
Edit: clarified that I was talking about the Pi 3B, not the base Pi 3 (which is somewhat cheaper than the Edison).
There aren't "A" variants for the Pi 2 or Pi 3.
There's the Pi Model A and Pi Model B, A+ and B+ (which are slightly upgraded versions of the original Pi), the original Compute Module ("CM1", based on the Pi but in an SO-DIMM format with 4GB eMMC Flash), the Pi 2, the Pi 3, the Pi Zero (upgraded to v1.3), the Compute Module 3 and 3 Lite ("CM3" and "CM3L" based on the Pi 3 but in an SO-DIMM format, with and without 4GB eMMC Flash respectively), and the latest addition, the Pi Zero W (Zero with built-in Wifi and Bluetooth).
The Pi 3, CM3, CM3L, Zero, and Zero W are what I'd consider current. But you can still get Pi 2, or the A+, on RS for example.
In the UK, the bare Edison module is £47.34 on RS. The bare CM3 (with the 4GB eMMC) is £26.99, the CM3L is £21.99. The Pi 3 is £32.99 (which is directly usable as it has ports already on it.)
I'd bet you a Pi Zero that the Pi 3 would piss all over the Edison in sysbench CPU if you ran both the Edison's 2 main cores against the Pi 3's 4 cores.
https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-unveils-intel-compute-...
It's also expensive relative to the rpi3 when wifi's built-in. The community is alright, intel's responsive but it's not similar in any fashion wrt size and established articles on how to get stuff to work. Their flash update program also rarely ever worked for me.
That said, once attached to the necessary peripherals, overall size would increase, which is sort of annoying, and makes the price tag even more irritating.
FWIW, there was a small craze of Wi-Fi SD cards a few months/years ago, and the Linux systems on (one of?) those was reverse-engineered to some extent. IIRC with one of them you could only connect to it via Wi-Fi (which generally isn't 100.00% reliable); the SD pins proved too difficult to commandeer.
Has both regular 100mb Ethernet and WiFi.
http://www.orangepi.org/orangepizero/
$9 total, shipped to the US.
The CM3 is the size of a stick of DDR2 Laptop RAM and has 4GB eMMC on it, for nearly half the price of the Edison module. http://i.imgur.com/TrEAklB.jpg
Not SD card sized, but still pretty cute.
That being said, has anyone managed to get FreeDOS on the edison?