Intel Edison, jack of all trades, but maybe master of none

The Intel Edison is a small system-on-chip (SoC) that measures about 35.5 × 25.0 × 3.9 mm (on its carrier PCB) which has a connector on it allowing it to be plugged into other things (it is possible to get the SoC on just the PCB without the edge connector).

The SoC board can then be plugged on to various boards from Intel, one is a breakout board which exposes various pins and has some USB sockets, there's also an Arduino compatible PCB allowing Arduino shields to be used.

The Edison tries to be everything to everyone, but doesn't always succeed. It actually has two processors inside, a dual thread dual core Atom running at 500MHz and a Quark 32 bit micro-controller running at 100MHz. The Atom runs Yocto Linux and the Quark a Real-time Operating System (RTOS).

It has 1GB of RAM and 4GB of Flash, 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0

There's a total of 40 I/O pins that can be configured to be: -

• SD card - 1 interface
• UART - 2 controllers, 1 with full flow control
• I2C - 2 controllers
• SPI - 1 controller with 2 chip selects
• I2S - 1 controller
• GPIO - 12 with 4 capable of PWM
• USB 2.0 - 1 OTG controller
• Clock output - 32 kHz, 19.2 MHz

Intel provide multiple ways of programming the system: -

• Arduino IDE (v1.6+, no longer requires an Intel specific build)
• Eclipse supporting: C, C++, and Python
• Intel XDK supporting: Node.JS and HTML5

There are other environments that also support Edison (in Arduino or direct mode) such as the node.js Johnny-Five system. Node-red can also be installed directly on the Edison and accessed through its web server. Google's Brillo is also an option now.

Running Linux does have benefits if you're into Linux environments as there's lots of packages that can be downloaded for it or indeed built as required.

You'll either love or hate Intel's development environment (XDK).

Integrating Edison into your own projects does give you a lot of flexibility, though the power requirements aren't as low as some other Arduino types (but by the time shields have been added to give the same functionality, power requirements increase with them). In theory it is possible to put the Atom to sleep and have the Quark micro controller do background non CPU intensive tasks and then it can wake the Atom up to do some hard processing or data transfers through WiFi say, but it's not meant to be 'easy' to actually implement.

The basic Edison (just the board) is around £42, on the small breakout board it's about £72 and on the Arduino base it's £96 though on-line pricing varies.

Overall the Edison really does tries to be everything to everyone and it's a pretty powerful computer (well 2), but it may be too generic for lots of things and the variety of programming modes etc can be confusing.

There's a new smartwatch on the BLOCKs

After a 2 year wait, the BLOCKS smartwatch is now live on Kickstarter. It has a round face and comes in 3 colours (Onyx Black, Marble White, Sunrise Red) with a 360 x 360 colour display with haptic feedback.

Inside it's got quite a lot of technology inside the core itself: -

• Snapdragon 400 CPU
• WiFi supporting 802.11b/g/n
• Bluetooth 4.1 (Bluetooth Low Energy/Bluetooth SMART)
• 512MB RAM
• 4GB Flash (ePOP
• 1.35" fully round display
• Accelerometer / Gyroscope
• Power button
• Microphone
• Vibration (motor)

It runs a (full) version of Android Lollipop (not Android Wear) which gives the core module much more functionality than standard Android based smartwatches. It doesn't stop there as the watch can be upgraded with modules (blocks) which can be thought of as strap links. A large wrist will support 4 blocks, while a more petite wrist should support 3.

Though designed to support extra modules, the watch core (i.e. the main round watch bit) will function by itself and the lowest cost option is just the core and a strap.

The BLOCKS smartwatch is fully compatible with both iOS (v8+) and Android.

The exciting bit is the additional modules, the following are available via the Kickstarter campaign: -

• Extra battery (the main battery lasts about a day and a half, this extends the period by at least 20%)
• Heart Rate module - uses and optical sensor
• GPS module
• NFC Module - may support contactless payment
• Adventure module - it measures altitude, pressure and temperature

Next year the following modules are planned (Phase 2): -

• GSM module - insert a SIM and leave your phone at home
• Fingerprint module - authenticate things, maybe NFC payments
• LED module - a torch?
• Button module - use for emergency alerts or anything else you can think of using a button for

Then at a later date the following modules might come into being: -

• Air Quality module
• Camera module
• Flash Memory module
• Stress Levels module

The smartphone app allows further modules to be purchased (BLOCKstore), customise watch faces and buy watch apps (BLOCKSware?).

The basic BLOCKS core (and strap) starts at $195. The Super Early Bird (sold out) was at $250, the Early Bird (one left at time of publishing) was $260 and the Late Early Bird is $275 which goes up to $285 when all the early birds have gone. All of the later pricing includes for modules and further modules can be purchased for $30. There are also options to purchase multiple units.

BLOCKS has now been fully funded (the campaign launched at 5pm UK time) and has raised over $300,000 of a $250,000 target, that's $300,000 in under 2 hours!!!