Intel Edison is an electronics prototyping platform equipped with a micro controller (Intel® Quark™) and a Dual Core CPU (Intel® Atom™) plus BLE and WiFi aimed for product prototyping of (IoT) connected type of devices
The board has some impressive features:
- Uses a 22nm Intel® SoC that includes a dual core, dual threaded Intel® Atom™ CPU at 500MHz and a 32-bit Intel® Quark™ microcontroller at 100 MHz. It supports 40 GPIOs and includes 1GB LPDDR3, 4 GB EMMC, and dual-band WiFi and BTLE on a module slighter larger than a postage stamp.
- The Intel Edison module will initially support development with Arduino* and C/C++, followed by Node.JS, Python, RTOS, and Visual Programming support in the near future.
- The Intel Edison module includes a device-to-device and device-to-cloud connectivity framework to enable cross-device communication and a cloud-based, multi-tenant, time-series analytics service.
Currently there is a modified version of the Arduino IDE to support development for the Quark microcontroller.
Most basic Arduino function work the same, but it's worth keeping in mind AVR specifics (such as interrupts and port manipulation) need to be ported for Intel Quark.
In addition, the Arduino Intel provides libmraa for lower level manipulation GPIO pins and interrupts. Also, the IoTKit makes it easier to publish sensor data online via a node.js service.
Useful links
- Official website
- Wikipedia entry
- libmraa repository
- IoTKit repository
- Unofficial Yocto build with newest U-Boot and Linux kernel
- Community effort to run vanilla kernel on it
