Introduction of the Intel® Edison
I got a new toy, it should make prototype easy (according to Intel). Let’s have a preview.
The board is small, very small. It roughly has the size of an SD Card, okay, it is a bit bigger and a bit thicker. Although this is very small, it has a lot of stuff going on. It has built in WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0/Bluetooth LE(Low energy)/BLE or whatever you want to call it. The processor is quite powerfull and there is lots of memory.
Figure 1: Intel Edison and an SD card (see it is really small!)
One big warning, the Edison uses 1.8 volt technology and is NOT 3.3 volt tollerant. When using the ports directly, you will need to use logic level shifters.
The market is also responding to this new device. The geeks from SparkFun Electronics have made a neat video introducing the Edison. It shows the Edison and also their complete range of SparkFun blocks which snap on to the Edison. A lot of blocks can be combined to interface to the Real World of Things.
Movie 1: Geek at SparkFun Electronics showing Edison with their blocks
How it looks:
Here are te Specs:
| PHYSICAL | |
| Form factor | Board with 70-pin connector |
| Dimensions | 35.5 × 25.0 × 3.9 mm (1.4 × 1.0 × 0.15 inches) max |
| C/M/F | Blue PCB with shields / No enclosure |
| Connector | Hirose DF40 Series (1.5, 2.0, or 3.0 mm stack height) |
| Operating temperature | 32 to 104°F (0 to 40°C) |
| EXTERNAL INTERFACES | |
| Total of 40 GPIOs, which can be configured as: | |
| SD card | 1 interface |
| UART | 2 controllers (1 full flow control, 1 Rx/Tx) |
| I2C | 2 controllers |
| SPI | 1 controller with 2 chip selects |
| I2S | 1 controller |
| GPIO | Additional 12 (with 4 capable of PWM) |
| USB 2.0 | 1 OTG controller |
| Clock output | 32 kHz, 19.2 MHz |
| MAJOR EDISON COMPONENTS | |
| SoC | 22 nm Intel® SoC that includes a dual-core, dual-threaded Intel® Atom™ CPU at 500 MHz and a 32-bit Intel® Quark™ microcontroller at 100 MHz |
| RAM | 1 GB LPDDR3 POP memory (2 channel 32bits @ 800MT/sec) |
| Flash storage | 4 GB eMMC (v4.51 spec) |
| WiFi | Broadcom* 43340 802.11 a/b/g/n; Dual-band (2.4 and 5 GHz) Onboard antenna |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 4.0 |
| POWER | |
| Input | 3.3 to 4.5 V |
| Output | 100 ma @3.3 V and 100 ma @ 1.8 V |
| Power | Standby (No radios): 13 mW Standby (Bluetooth 4.0): 21.5 mW (BTLE in Q4-14) Standby (Wi-Fi): 35 mW |
| FIRMWARE + SOFTWARE | |
| CPU OS | Yocto Linux* v1.6 |
| Development environments | Arduino* IDE Eclipse supporting: C, C++, and Python Intel XDK supporting: Node.JS and HTML5 |
| MCU OS | RTOS |
| Development environments | MCU SDK and IDE |
| INTEL® EDISON BREAKOUT BOARD | |
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| Slightly larger than the Intel® Edison module, the Intel® Edison Breakout Board has a minimal set of features: | |
| INTEL® EDISON BOARD FOR ARDUINO | |
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| Supports Arduino Sketch, Linux, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. | |
| Board I/O: Compatible with Arduino Uno (except 4 PWM instead of 6 PWM): | |