psas/launch-tower

Investigate Intel Edison as a board

OutboundFlight opened this issue · 5 comments

OutboundFlight commented

Initially: the Edison is a lot smaller than the BBB, has very low power requirements, and is an x86 rather than ARM. On the other hand, there's very little support and we would need a separate analog input.

One thing that would help with this project is generating a list of what makes for a good LTC.

nellump commented

"One thing that would help with this project is generating a list of what makes for a good LTC."

That's the goal of the Functional Spec (ltc3/doc/functional/functional.adoc). Feel free to add any thoughts or ideas to it.

OutboundFlight commented

Okay, thanks for the clarification. I'll go through it ASAP.

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 12:10 AM, Paul Mullen notifications@github.com
wrote:

"One thing that would help with this project is generating a list of what
makes for a good LTC."

That's the goal of the Functional Spec
(ltc3/doc/functional/functional.adoc). Feel free to add any thoughts or
ideas to it.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#7 (comment).

aSmig commented

I have a spare Edison with dev board if someone wants to do some testing. Onboard WiFi is much more limited than an Alpha, no Ethernet, only one USB host port on the dev board (plus one OTG) and still can't touch ARM thermal performance. Plenty of GPIO including analog if you use the dev board, which is more than twice the size of the BBB. The Yocto stock image needs some tweaking before it would be production ready. It is important to disable constant log writes to soldered down flash, for example.

nellump commented

Edison looks like a nice board, and it might even be a better match for LTC3 if it wasn't for the lack of Ethernet. That's a deal-breaker. (Ethernet over USB is possible. Not sure what that does to network latency.)

Expanding on aSmig's comparison above:

  • Edison has a 500 MHz dual-core Atom proc.; BBB has a 1 GHz ARM A8 proc.
  • Edison has 1 GB RAM; BBB has 512 MB.
  • Both boards have 4 GB of eMMC.
  • Edison has on-board WiFi and Bluetooth LE.
  • Edison has no Ethernet.
  • Edison compute module only supports 1.8 V IO.
  • Edison has no on-board display support; BBB has HDMI.
  • Both boards have more GPIOs than we'll know what to do with.
  • Both boards can be easily mounted onto an appropriately-designed expansion board.
  • Edison compute module is a tiny board with no external interfaces but a single Hirose connector. It will require an expansion/breakout board to be useful. In that respect, it is very similar to the Qseven boards.
  • Edison has an on-board microcontroller external to the main processor.
  • Prices appears to be about the same (~$55).

Reference:

BartMassey commented

Ethernet over USB is fine for whatever we're going to be doing, IMHO. Nobody puts it in anymore because that.