Intel Edison now shipping. Aimed at Internet of Things...

Currently priced at about $50.  Similar in concept to arduino/pi, but comes with built-in wi-fi and Bluetooth.  
 
Overview info from Intel is rather meager, so here's a campy Sparkfun video that conveys the concept, albeit from Sparkfun's point of view:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY8kaaFzbTE

Skipping the Negative-Neil-ly side of my personality ...
 
Interesting, I like the 1G of RAM, storage is not a great issue with cloud storage (my own ;-) ). I don't know about the power. If I can power it off a couple of solar cells (and battery) then it could be interesting for high computational power but I won''t how this compares in with the higher end ARM and the recent MIPs. Still competition is a good thing.
 
As sort of a PS, it's interesting to see the 'microcontroller' end of things getting what has typically been the desktop HP. I have no doubt this this is a good thing. Heck IPv6 stack alone is a pig, dual stack even worse. I'd love to see what the low end requirements are for an IPv6 stack and application for a microcontroller are going to be.

I was excited by this at first - nice power, decent price-point... Then I realized that when you just buy the $50 main-board, you can't do anything until you also buy breakout boards for IO connectivity, etc. The price quickly climbs to, and over $100 depending on what connectivity you want. I'll take 2-3 Raspberry PIs or Beagle Bone Blacks for the same price...

I agree with both of you.  It has some nice bits, but I don't see how Edison has the potential to overtake its immediate competitors.  Even the TI launchpads seems more compelling.

What do you think about the Photon?
https://www.spark.io/
hackable does not sound like an reliable 24/7 operation capability, but may be the marketeering lost control over their horses...

Efried said:

What do you think about the Photon?
https://www.spark.io/
hackable does not sound like an reliable 24/7 operation capability, but may be the marketeering lost control over their horses...

Click to expand...

Like the price, doubt that will last. The board has enough RAM and Flash (good), has fewer pins (not great but might not be bad either), is in pre-order (I don't want to be pre 1.0 on hardware) and has a cloud picture on it's page (red flag).

I still need more info, especially that cloud part. I build a board that can connect to the cloud (via MQTT) but I've kept that 'Cloud' private. Not big on the whole public cloud thing at the moment.

I agree Neil. I thought about getting one to try, but I'm still a bit old school and prefer that a device like this be hard-wired to my server/collection-point. I'm also very anti-cloud.

linuxha said:

Like the price, doubt that will last. The board has enough RAM and Flash (good), has fewer pins (not great but might not be bad either), is in pre-order (I don't want to be pre 1.0 on hardware) and has a cloud picture on it's page (red flag).

I still need more info, especially that cloud part. I build a board that can connect to the cloud (via MQTT) but I've kept that 'Cloud' private. Not big on the whole public cloud thing at the moment.

Click to expand...

 
exactly,  may be cloud is only optional. I don't see another low footprint solution having a wireless ecotope.

Efried said:

What do you think about the Photon?
https://www.spark.io/
hackable does not sound like an reliable 24/7 operation capability, but may be the marketeering lost control over their horses...

Click to expand...

The more the merrier. Some of the deciding factors are range, power consumption, and needed throughput.  For lower power and/or greater range, I think a narrowband solution like this is better:
http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/rf-328-arduino-atmega-328-compatible-radio-transceiver-rfu-328/
It's a simple serial-over-wireless transceiver built onto an arduino.  The cost is less, but it's close enough to be a wash.  Also a small size.  However, you need a receiver, and wi-fi is already in so many things.
 
I tried a wi-fi breakout board from Adafruit, and the range was awful.  Not sure why.  I even used an external antenna.  I would hope the Photon's wi-fi does better.
 
As to CPU strength, the edison and photon obviously beat the ciseco, which has a puny arduino processor.  However, comparing the edison and the photon, I find it hard to compare cpu's against one another without benchmarks.  Other than looking at clock speed and word size and number of address bits, how do you do it?  For instance, I'm struggling right now to figure out which little linux device has enough muscle to run HomeSeer3 fast enough, and I'm at wits-end trying to guess it on paper.  The Edison has an x86 architecture, so it might possibly run HomeSeer3 if it can load Debian, but would it be fast enough?  I kinda doubt it, but... maybe?  Maybe at $50 you just buy it and try it.  Seems like there should be a better way of deciding though.

NeverDie said:

The more the merrier. Some of the deciding factors are range, power consumption, and needed throughput.  For lower power and/or greater range, I think a narrowband solution like this is better:
http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/rf-328-arduino-atmega-328-compatible-radio-transceiver-rfu-328/
It's a simple serial-over-wireless transceiver built onto an arduino.  The cost is less, but it's close enough to be a wash.  Also a small size.  However, you need a receiver, and wi-fi is already in so many things.
 
I tried a wi-fi breakout board from Adafruit, and the range was awful.  Not sure why.  I even used an external antenna.  I would hope the Photon's wi-fi does better.
 
As to CPU strength, the edison and photon obviously beat the ciseco, which has a puny arduino processor.  However, comparing the edison and the photon, I find it hard to compare cpu's against one another without benchmarks.  Other than looking at clock speed and word size and number of address bits, how do you do it?  For instance, I'm struggling right now to figure out which little linux device has enough muscle to run HomeSeer3 fast enough, and I'm at wits-end trying to guess it on paper.  The Edison has an x86 architecture, so it might possibly run HomeSeer3 if it can load Debian, but would it be fast enough?  I kinda doubt it, but... maybe?  Maybe at $50 you just buy it and try it.  Seems like there should be a better way of deciding though.

Click to expand...

 
There are some quantitative points sure like range but I would like to stick to the programming paradigm (if possible python or 4 GL) and the ability to interact openly, scale good and protect operation from outside hackers.

Clock for clock (which already gets confusing with ARM / Intel CPUs) I personally still like the Intel/AMD X86/64bit CPU for running Homeseer 3.
 
I have not ordered an Edision to play with.  Price points (most for you money) now though go to the little Intel Celeron based mini pcs which are around $100.
 
I have been running Homeseer 3 Pro / Homeseer ZeeLite on the RPI.  It runs fine at the 700Mhz clock speed.  I have also overclocked the RPi to 900Mhz and does well.  I have only recently added an RTC clock (with battery).  I have now tested a few plugins running remotely on the RPi talking to a bigger CPU (well 64bit Ubuntu) mothership and they also do fine.  Pushing it with multiple scripts, plugins and events will take it to a crawl; literally. 
 
The RPi Homeseer Zee was made to only run a lite version of Homeseer. Most likely most folks will have problems or issues trying to run HS3 Pro on a tiny RPi or similiar.  That said one plugin, a couple of scripts, variables and events shouldn't ding it too much.
 
The challenge though is fun and a learning experience.  While the base OS is very light on the RPi; adding Mono to it makes it heavy (heavier and slower).  Here initially tested and still running an older Seagate Dockstar with Mono on it.  Its been now close to 3 years running 24/7.  it is tiny.  Today it uses a USB to SSD drive (tiny thing) as boot / OS drive and an SSD USB stick as a scratch drive.  Runs great and I have had no issues to date.
 
Currently also playing with running Wine on Ubuntu.  This is a bit heavier than just running Mono.  I have been able to get MS SAPI running fine, Homeseer Speaker dot exe and Homeseer Touch for Wintel running (among other Wintel thingies).  You get to see the little granular pieces of MS needed to run this stuff.  I am not really good at this stuff playing with it; so far it works OK if I throw the kitchen sink at it.  Noticed too now that Ubuntu 14.10 is very virtual container like making it very different than Ubuntu 14.04.  (but that is my take on it).
 
On a different endeavor purchased a TP-Link Microrouter running at 400Mhz, little play space, two NIC ports and 1 USB port and updated it with Open-WRT.  I am amazed at what this little device can do.  That said though the OS is very simple and functional.
I am pushing it now adding a tiny custom daughter board for it (from Australia) to do just a bit more (well an RTC clock for one).
 
Personally I find the whole gamut of little ARM based experimenting boards just that and not yet ready for 24/7 always up and never failing automation stuff.  I have trashed a soldered on MMC chip on an Intel maxi mobile CPU board which did fine for a couple of years rewriting OS's over and over again then finally failed.  But it wasn't made to do this.  Initially it was sold as a cloud based do all touchscreen tabletop tablet running a very custom / tiny cloud based OS on a 1Gb MMC (EFI boot).  Well too its very easy to write to a mini SD card and not as easy to JTAG new firmware / OS to a chip.  IE: the old Chumby had a base kernel boot on a chip then the OS was on a little micro SD inside.  (I never did trash it though - very customized mini linux cloud based OS). 

roussell said:

I agree Neil. I thought about getting one to try, but I'm still a bit old school and prefer that a device like this be hard-wired to my server/collection-point. I'm also very anti-cloud.

Click to expand...

I'm not anti-cloud but I don't trust it yet. There will be good things only available in the Cloud. Of course there is going to be a lot of junk in it too. A lot of companies who will nickel and dime it users. I'll stop here before I go on a rant.
 
One interesting thing I read today, When we open up to the cloud we extend to our network into the cloud and while we might have slightly looser security within our secure domain, when we extend  it into the cloud we lose that security domain. Definitely something to think about.
 
I take it one step further (and this is scary), devices in your home can call out to the internet and attach to a MQTT server and pub/sub (give status/ take orders). This is normal operation for the device I built. Hmm, I need to get busy with traffic accounting. I'll really need to give security a huge thought.

pete_c said:

Clock for clock (which already gets confusing with ARM / Intel CPUs) I personally still like the Intel/AMD X86/64bit CPU for running Homeseer 3.
 
I have not ordered an Edision to play with.  Price points (most for you money) now though go to the little Intel Celeron based mini pcs which are around $100.
 
I have been running Homeseer 3 Pro / Homeseer ZeeLite on the RPI.  It runs fine at the 700Mhz clock speed.  I have also overclocked the RPi to 900Mhz and does well.  I have only recently added an RTC clock (with battery).  I have now tested a few plugins running remotely on the RPi talking to a bigger CPU (well 64bit Ubuntu) mothership and they also do fine.  Pushing it with multiple scripts, plugins and events will take it to a crawl; literally. 
 
The RPi Homeseer Zee was made to only run a lite version of Homeseer. Most likely most folks will have problems or issues trying to run HS3 Pro on a tiny RPi or similiar.  That said one plugin, a couple of scripts, variables and events shouldn't ding it too much.
 
The challenge though is fun and a learning experience.  While the base OS is very light on the RPi; adding Mono to it makes it heavy (heavier and slower).  Here initially tested and still running an older Seagate Dockstar with Mono on it.  Its been now close to 3 years running 24/7.  it is tiny.  Today it uses a USB to SSD drive (tiny thing) as boot / OS drive and an SSD USB stick as a scratch drive.  Runs great and I have had no issues to date.

Click to expand...

 
That's good info.  Admittedly, these aren't Xeon's running on commercial grade server motherboards.  On the other hand, how good is good enough when it comes to reliability for home automation?
 
WRT benchstrength to handle higher loads,what do you think about an approach like Rob's where you add extra compute modules to run demanding HS plug-ins, and those interconnect over a bus (or ethernet in Rob's case, or perhaps Photons communicating over wi-fi)?  I mean, the Edison looks like it might have been made for that sort of thing, as does the raspi's compute module:
 
 
 
With photons you could add more compute muscle without even wiring anything together.  Maybe most of the photons sleep most of the time, and they wake up only as needed.  In that case you could have a lot of standby capacity just sitting in their cardboard boxes.  Maybe you don't even need to open the shrinkwrap on the shipping container!  Plus, it would seem that by spreading out the heat, you could get by with passive cooling and keep it all silent.

Yup; here ran the Rob's HAI plugin remotely on the RPi talking to the Homeseer 3 and it did fine.  The UPB plugin was the first one that I tested.
 
The whole remote thing started way back with the Rob's first beta of the HAI plugin.  I kept pushing on the RPi initially trying to break it. 
 
Have a look (don't remember) now when I posted about looking for a group buy for a celeron mini pc.  Initially it started with a look for a faster "like" RPi.
 
Rob went looking at the Arm stuff while I went the Intel direction looking at the Celerons.  Initially looking at using both to do comparisions.
 
Personally I think Rob's idea relating to the remote running of a plugin is a very good idea.  Sort of distributed running software.  You can also put the RPi or Arm device right next to the USB/Serial interface.  Here my Levition HAI OPII panel provides the power (well and battery backup).  I have it inside of the can (along with the TP-Link Microrouter).
 
I do utilize a commercial motherboard today for Homeseer 2 (it also included a built into the BIOS watch dog circuit).
 
BCM Industrial Motherboards 
 
Overclocking the RPi haven't noticed much more heat.  I am going slow though.  You can put little passive heat sinks on these too. 
 
I have been getting some metrics from the RPi and so far its looking good (CPU / Temps stuff).
 
Unrelated but my 8 chip / 8 port video card got so hot that I used these little passive heat sinks and put a fan on just the video capture card. 

Efried said:

There are some quantitative points sure like range but I would like to stick to the programming paradigm (if possible python or 4 GL) and the ability to interact openly, scale good and protect operation from outside hackers.

Click to expand...

 
Thanks for bringing Photon to our attention.  It does sound interesting.  I think I'll probably take a closer look at it, and I may order one or two to try out.  I also like the idea of the wireless web interface for programming it: makes using it less of a hassle. 
 
Will it run Python?  If not, and if that's important to you,  you may want to look into this:  http://www.micropython.org/