The Intel
Edison is rapidly exploding in the maker world. Every day I'm seeing more and more projects, applications and double-awesome ideas revolving around the tiny platform.
One other thing I've noticed about the Edison is people working to get their head around it's position within the maker market. Although it's Arduino compatible, the Edison is still very much its own platform, and that's an important differentiation to make when choosing it as the brains of your latest project's operation.
There are lots of getting started guides out there, and we'll probably work up our own in the near future too, but if you're anything like me you get a better idea of a platform's suitability not through instruction manuals and set up tutorials, but through projects.
Here's a hot selection of the Edison projects that caught my eye while I wandered the busy highways of the internets, looking for its home.
Got your own Edison project on the go? Tell us all about it, and why not post a quick tutorial if you've already made something Edison-awesome?
Interactive Intel Edison Synapse Dress | |
Although it might not be a step-by-step build-along project like the others, I've got to give a digital high five to the awesome Anouk Wipprecht for her Edison-powered fashion statement, the Synapse dress. This 3D-printed smart garment has bio sensors embedded in its framework, and its built-in lighting changes colour according to the wearer's mood. |  |
Intel Edison IoT Doorbell | |
| This net-connected smart doorbell places a wi-fi call to the occupants' collective smartphones, and initiates a live video call so you can see who's on your doorstep, even if you're not at home. |  |
Intel Edison Radar | |
| It might be a bit of a stretch, calling it a radar, but you can certainly appreciate where they're coming from with this fun project. An ultrasonic sensor is mounted on a servo, which in turn sits on top of the Edison Arduino board. The servo rotates the sensor and sends the data back to the PC, with distance measurements of whatever's in front of it. |  |
Automated Curtain Using Intel Edison and thethings.IO | |
| Here, the Edison takes care of automatically opening a window blind in the morning, closes it at night, and responds to a light sensor while also taking remote commands from a Pebble smartwatch! It'd benefit from slightly better mounting options, as it seems to just be hanging from the wires to the servo, but that'd be easy to take care of. An excellent addition to your home automation project. |  |
Telegram Bot with Intel Edison | |
| Just FYI, Telegram is kind of like the "other" WhatsApp. A decent IM app that's actually much easier to incorporate into your projects and makes smartphone notifications and controls easy and attractive. Like in this Edison bot project, which allows you to quiz your Edison on the status of, for example, its attached sensors and get a response back on your smartphone, from anywhere. This is a pretty high level example of combining Telegram and the Edison, but it makes it easy to see how this function could be incorporated into many different kinds of projects. |  |
Edison in Near-Space | |
| Intel's own engineer, Mikal Hart, strapped his Edison to a helium balloon, along with a GoPro camera. He connected them together using an ad-hoc wi-fi network, while having the "battery-powered Edison gathering position data from one satellite system (GPS) and transmitting it to the ground via another (Iridium), while a GoPro camera gathered high-resolution full-motion video". And they got some pretty splendid video and photos in the process. This one of the weather balloon could have been taken underwater through a microscope, instead of in space, and looks kind of... organic. |  |
Obstacle Avoiding Edison Robot | |
| Much aligned with the Edison radar above, this project also combines the platform with the popular Grove ultrasonic sensor. Ordinarily, the Arduino board for the Edison looks a bit big, but in this context -- as the body of a wheeled robot -- it's actually a perfect size. Also, it's impossible not to find this project especially endearing, since it looks so much like Johnny 5! |  |
Environment Monitoring Edison Rover | |
| And while we're on the subject or Edison-powered robots, this one takes the concept to the next level by using the Mars Rover as inspiration. Kitted out with a range of environmental sensors, this web-app controlled robot can cruise around while gathering up data and boosting it to the cloud, making it a nice addition to any IoT solution. |  |
Edison Home Automation Tweeter | |
| Because of the Edison's inherent connectivity, it's an ideal platform for IoT, and therefore, home automation. These guys have used lighting as an example when hooking the Edison up to Twitter, so the device can broadcast info from your home, to the web. It's up to you what info is sent out, of course, but the take away from this project is how the Edison can be used to automate your operations, and transmit the data where ever it's most useful to you. |  |
Got your own Edison projects? Tell us all about 'em!
