Intel Edison generic calculator shield photo journal

[Claudio L.]

(03-30-2015 12:48 AM)MarkHaysHarris777 Wrote:  I have also discovered that while the Quark MCU is powerful and flexible, often it is desirable to have a dedicated MCU on the the board like an Atmega328; to handle exclusively display and keyboard I|O, while the Edison's Quark is free for data gathering, and the Atom(s) are free for analytics. Things to think about.

For display... perhaps, depending on how much you intend to draw on the display and its resolution, but for keyboard? All you need is an interrupt line, it takes zero CPU effort until you press a key, and then your keyboard driver will be finished in only a few microseconds.
I don't see how you could justify the complexity and power of an additional MCU only to read a keyboard matrix. Just passing information from one CPU to the other would be more complex than reading the keyboard directly from the main CPU.

Claudio