Intel Edison Module

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/edison.html

by gao8a • 12 years ago

217 53 12 years ago

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

I went browsing around their site this morning when I got the email of the release. I cannot say that I understand Intel's strategy here. On the one hand they could release 'Quark' like Atmel ships AVR's or ST Micro ships STM32 chips with a data sheet and a demo board, on the other they seem to want to jump into some sort of "Intel at System supplier" kind of thing where its mosly proprietary interfaces and only works with their stuff.

When I look at something like the Nucleo boards[1] I see a chip company leveraging the energy around Arduino to push their own ISA, but that is just a form factor play AFAICT. What does Intel hope to achieve here? And can they do that without being a crapload more "open" than they have been in the past?

[1] http://www.mouser.com/new/stmicroelectronics/stm-nucleo-deve...

makomk3• 12 years ago

Intel's problem is that it's a lot harder to turn their chips into a complete system than it is AVRs or STM32, because Intel's solution is a full SoC running Linux that requires seperate RAM and Flash chips and external power supply circuitry that has to meet some nasty power sequencing requirements. This is basically Intel's version of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module which exists for much the same reason.

craigjb• 12 years ago

Edison is the size of a postage stamp including DDR. The picture linked is of the module plugged into a board.

gte525u2• 12 years ago

It's the SOC plus their quark microcontroller on a module. I think that's the niche they are going for - ease of programming of a general purpose OS plus real-time control via the quark.

centizen• 12 years ago

Very interesting! The picture is kind of confusing though, it took me a minute to realize that the picture was of an "expansion board" with the module installed (in the lower left hand corner).

I like what I see though, they have packed quite a bit of processing power into the tiny package. Good amounts of memory too. And I really like the built in WiFi/bluetooth. Looks like it could be a good option for making connected devices with. The only problem is transitioning from prototype to production with Intels current business model.

This video does a good job to show off the Edison on it's own, for anyone interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GY8k...

MrBuddyCasino3• 12 years ago

Its definitely a lot better than the Galileo - Intel was pretty liberal giving them away for free, yet still nobody used them since they sucked.

Not sure what the strategy is though - are they afraid to loose developer mindshare to Atmel / TI? Are they hoping that their chips will power the next kickstarter success?

My 5 cents: at least they are a player now, and the CC3200 has a competitor.

Issues:

- for battery-powered projects, its a bit large

- 1.8V logic level is nice for energy consumption, but its really hard to source components for that, and level shifters are annoying

- price is a tad bit high, though adequate for its performance

akiselev• 12 years ago

Minor nitpick about the voltage: How many chips at this level (at the border of micrcontroller to microprocessor) actually use more than 1.8V for internal logic? Other than a few chips that have on board power switching from 3.3V, I can't find any other CPUs, DDR3 RAM, or even CMOS cameras (720p+ chips) that don't require a 1.8V rail.

For prototyping a divider with 1% resistors would do just fine (although with some instability with a bad breadboard) and if you can't find 1.8V power parts for production you have much bigger problems. As for level translators, I've found they are almost inevitable on any design that uses enough chips and sensors.

rasz_pl5• 12 years ago

You need to realize they are trying to compete in a market soon to be dominated by $4 a pop (RETAIL) Chinese modules. They will fail (and so will TI).

http://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/new-chip-alert-the-esp8266-wi...

Galileo was a total failure. Intel gave up giving whole stock to MS, MS in turn gave them out to developers pretending they have viable IoT platform.

revelation• 12 years ago

Presumably its shipping now, but I can't seem to find anywhere to buy it.

WLAN has been somewhat sorely lacking for these mini computers, your only option was pretty much the rather terrible MIPS platforms made for routers.

tinco• 12 years ago

You have to scroll to below the list of links that look like they're a footer, and you'll see a big blue bar that shows the 'where to buy' links. It sells for 50 bucks at Sparkfun, you can also buy the kit at makershed.

Hopefully they'll send some to Farnell so we Europeans can get a taste of it as well.

guiomie• 12 years ago

http://www.makershed.com/products/intel-edison-breakout-boar...

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13024

tdicola• 12 years ago

Impressive how much Intel can shrink their X86 processors and supporting hardware. However I think Intel is making a mistake trying to push Arduino 'compatibility' with this and the Galileo. Unless they actually put an AVR microcontroller on board it will have poor compatibility with Arduino shields (like the Galileo). You also won't have real-time control of the GPIO so making servos move smoothly, talking to 1-wire-like interfaces (like WS2811 LEDs), etc. will be problematic. Lots of folks were excited about the Galileo but unhappy after actually using it and realizing its limitations. Hopefully Intel will get the messaging a little better this time.

pinkyand• 12 years ago

I think they've improved in this regard: they've added an independent microcontroller inside the core(which will probably run the arduino layer).This will solve compatibility and real time issues.

This is in general targeted to a bunch of chips that integrate a microprocessor and a microcontroller and are usually fabricated in 65nm-45nm. With it's process advantage(22nm finfet) , intel can offer orders of magnitude lower sleep currents, some nice decrease on power(depending on x86 vs arm details), and more power in general. All interesting to embedded guys.

But they still have to create a large library of peripherals and support it(which they might solve by creating a few speedy cores and let the crowd code and share/support peripherals), add analog blocks, and gain the trust of the embedded community as a reliable long term supplier(which might be the one thing intel couldn't solve - because of it's past as an unreliable embedded supplier).

The second option is that this is mainly to motivate other embedded chip companies guys to use it's fabs.

Anyway ,i'm grabbing the popcorn.

gte525u2• 12 years ago

The one bit I can't find anywhere in the docs released so far. Is there a communication mechanism between the microcontroller and the main core?

It's not hard to dangle a micro off of i2c or some other bus, however, I can definitely see the the benefit of an easy prototyping solution combining an beefy (~100k RAM and 100Mhz CPU) real-time micro and a general purpose OS with wifi / bluetooth LE.

zrail• 12 years ago

The Arduino block that SparkFun is selling[1] has an actual AVR on it that communicates with the Edison via a UART.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13036

markokrajnc• 12 years ago

How much power does it use? In documents I read:

Standby (No radios): 13 mW Standby (Bluetooth 4.0): 21.5 mW (BTLE in Q4-14) Standby (Wi-Fi): 35 mW

It this turned ON and waiting on standby? Or is this turned OFF standby? And how much does it use when CPU is working?

makomk3• 12 years ago

That's almost certainly standby as in turned off, given the figures I've seen for previous Intel IoT boards with much lower end chips than this one.

kbaker• 12 years ago

I've looked around at all their docs and still can't find this number. Almost like they are hiding from something... I wouldn't imagine a full Atom can get anywhere close to running off a standard USB port 500 mA, like the Beaglebone Black or RPi.

Seems weird that they wouldn't at least drop it somewhere. Kinda important if you have to make a carrier board for it.

polskibus• 12 years ago

How about adding Erlang support ? It would be great to be able to program multiple devices with OTP-level of support for mesh network topologies.

pantalaimon• 12 years ago

Erlang is not supported on x86?

skorgu2• 12 years ago

This is pretty close to something I've wanted for ages: the smallest possible Ceph OSD. This doesn't have the right set of devices on it but it's pretty close.

Ditch the wifi for gigabit ethernet, slap a sata controller on the pci-e and mount it in a stackable frame with a power bus. Buy a drive, one of these nodes and stack it on top of your existing ones. Bam your own tiny cloud you can expand in increments of one drive (and commodity ethernet). It's probably a commercial non-starter now that 8TB drives exist but I still love the idea.

Or now that I think about it skip the sata and just sell it with some NVMe flash storage built in. Stackable storage bricks.

skrause• 12 years ago

http://www.minnowboard.org/meet-minnowboard-max/ might be closer to what you're looking for.

skorgu2• 12 years ago

Hey so it is, that's awesome. Thanks!

Andys• 12 years ago

Have you seen those Seagate HDDs with built in ethernet? Might be better to just plug all the drives in to a switch and co-ordinate a cluster of them from a controller node

rasz_pl5• 12 years ago

So you want a small PC, not an embedded platform.

songgao• 12 years ago

Can anybody confirm whether the wireless chip used (BCM43340) is FullMAC or SoftMAC? The model is not listed on either brcmsmac nor brcmsmac. The wifi driver that comes with the source code downloaded from Intel is not in a Linux tree and it even has IP and TCP related stuff. I'm confused.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

And what exactly are you going to do with an "x86" expensive dev board with 500 Mhz Atom CPUs and 1GB of RAM? Run XP on it?

Sophistifunk3• 12 years ago

This is why we can't have nice things.

Sophistifunk3• 12 years ago

Personally, I love the idea of low-spec 86 chips being available at rock-bottom prices. It's an architecture that while far from perfect is well known, and most of us here have a boatload of experience with it I'll wager. I'd really like to see something similar to this but for 2 or 3x the price (it's only $50) that includes a framebuffer, hdmi and a fully documented hardware blitter or bargain-basement GPU.

LogicFailsMe• 12 years ago

Wouldn't that more or less be the already available Tegra K1?

Sophistifunk3• 12 years ago

It's my understanding you need to be a multi-million-dollar company to even get NVidia to answer your calls to talk about showing you the NDA you need to sign to get access to register-level Tegra programming docs? If I'm wrong I'd be very happy. Intel has been really good at documenting their GPUs though. I want to play on the metal, running under Linux with a binary blob framebuffer driver doesn't interest me.

robzyb• 12 years ago

And SATA! Please someone give me SATA, gigabit ethernet, and a cheap/easy way to do DMA!

rasz_pl5• 12 years ago

experience? you mean you use assembler? ever touch registers directly? no? thought so. x86 has zero advantages over other architectures in embedded world.

zurn• 12 years ago

There have been low end x86s available for many years, eg the Vortex SoCs. They are still around, the company even put out an Arduino compatible board recently: http://linuxgizmos.com/arduino-compatible-boardset-runs-linu...

burtonator• 12 years ago

I'd love to see Tesla Inc sue Intel saying that they stole all the tech for their Edison Module :)

makmanalp• 12 years ago

Seems like a prime candidate for a unikernel like mirage (http://openmirage.org/blog/announcing-mirage-20-release)

twotwotwo• 12 years ago

Fun thing, though obviously not quite the same: Transcend wifi SD cards are (or at least were) running Linux on ARM, hosting a Perl CGI script(!) that could be exploited to let you do your own thing with the card -- see http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-...

ksec• 12 years ago

Give it PIC-Express lanes with SATA Raid or Gigabit Ethernet Controller, it will be perfect for NAS / Router.

cypher5432• 12 years ago

There are plenty of boards for that kind of application already (PC Engines APU[1], for example). That's not really what Edison is intended for.

[1] http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm

aswanson• 12 years ago

What is the price?

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

Scroll to the bottom of the "More for Makers" page:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/maker....

at "Where to Buy"

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

For people like me who are too stupid to make things with it, can I use this to replace my Raspberry Pi+RaspBMC setup? How's the performance?

cypher5432• 12 years ago

There's no video core, so no HDMI or even VGA output. Edison is designed for things like robotics and home automation. It's not a general-purpose x86 computer.

sireat• 12 years ago

I couldn't find any info, but I guess one will have to wait for adapter so Edison can output to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPD-Link that is connect Edison to most LCD monitors.

Intel Edison Module

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