Hello all,
My name is Mubarak Abdu-Aguye, an Embedded Systems enthusiast from Nigeria. A few weeks ago I received an Intel Edison Kit for Arduino, courtesy of Element14, to build a small vehicular robotic platform. The platform will be controlled from a personal computer (PC) serving as the Base Station. The vehicular platform will also stream live video and sensor data back to the Base Station. I intend to write a series of blog posts about it, covering the entire build process, so for starters, I wanted to begin with a short unboxing post.
The kit arrived like so:
It consists of the Edison Compute Module, and a Breakout Board, plastic standoffs and a user manual. The Compute Module holds the processor, RAM and radios, while the Breakout board makes the IOs and peripherals available for (easy) use. Opening the box, we see the Edison Compute Module in all its glory:
Here are the contents of the box:
The breakout board is the item in the lower left side of the photo. Plastic standoffs at the lower right side, user manual at the top right side.
Here’s the Compute Module in the palm of my hand:
Here’s the Breakout Board taken out of the packaging:
Here, we can see the Arduino-compatible female headers, as well as the region reserved for the Edison Compute Module itself. The USB ports (host, device and debug in that order) are visible on the right hand side of the board. The Edison cannot be in host and device mode simultaneously, so a tiny switch (labelled SW1) switches between host mode and device mode. The DC power jack is also visible at the top-right corner, allowing the Edison to be powered by an external source of between 7-15V. At the top, a little to the right, is the SD card slot, which can be used to boot the OS and store data (persistently).
Here’s the completed kit (Edison + Breakout):
I intend to explore the software side of things in my next post, specifically deploying an OS to the Edison. At this point I intend to use the MRAA library for low-level hardware access (providing PWM signals to drive the motors, change direction, read sensors, etc etc), but I need to get a suitable OS up and running first, so that will be the focus of my next post.
Until then…live long and prosper!
