Intel Edison Projects

You must purchase an Intel Edison

One of the projects in this course involves Embedded System development and Internet of Things communication. To do this project you will need to purchase your own Intel Edison (a low power IA32 architecture System on a Chip which Intel has developed for the embedded system market. The development system we are using is I/O pin compatible with the (slow but) extremely popular Arduino board. The combination means that the Edison can exploit numerous Arduino shields with much much more sophisticated software running on a Linux system. It is a compelling combination, for both course and personal projects.

Because this course is based on Open Source texts, we will not be requiring you to purchase any Operating Systems texts. It seems ironic that we are asking you to purchase a development system that costs just about as much as a text. But I suggest that you will get more fun and future use from your Edison than you would from an OS text ... and if you don't it will probably have a better resale value on Ebay.

What you need to order

  1. Intel Edison Kit for Arduino Antenna (EDI2ARDUIN.AL.K). This is an Arduino-compatible Edison board with a dual-core 32-bit Atom processor with Bluetooth and Wifi. It is available from all the usual places: Amazon, NewEgg, Sparkfun and Mouser.
  2. A power-supply (9 V, 650 mA, center-positive 5.5 mm × 2.1 mm barrel connector) for the Edison board. These too are available from all of your favorite sources, such as Amazon and Sparkfun.
  3. A USB 2.0 cable (A male to micro B male) that supports 480 Mb/s transmission. Compatible cables are available from multiple sources (e.g., Amazon). In general you should not trust USB cables that you may already have.
  4. A Grove Sensor Starter Kit for Arduino. This is a set of Arduino-compatible sensors (sound, light, touch, angle, ...), switches, displays and actuators that you can use to build all manner of cool projects. These too are available from multiple places including Amazon.

Because of the possibility of problems with finding, ordering, receiving and bringing up your Edison development system, it is strongly encouraged that you order it immediately, and do the basic bring-up as soon as it arrives.

Additional Information

Intel has a set of tutorials on setting up your Edison.

UCLA has created a basic set of tutorials on bringing up, communicating with, installing and developing software for the Edison:

  1. Assembly and Bring-Up
  2. Linux and the Edison
  3. Introduction to OPKG
  4. VIM on the Edison
  5. GPIO, Interrupts, and I2C Interfaces
  6. SPI, PWM and more GPIO
  7. TCP Socket Communications
  8. 9DOF Sensor
  9. Timing Analysis and Synchronization