Intel Edison generic calculator shield photo journal

[MarkHaysHarris777]

(03-23-2015 08:29 PM)matthiaspaul Wrote:  The Edison provides a compound processor with three cores, two Atoms running at 500 MHz and one Quark running at 100 MHz. One of them would be enough to accomplish the task.

Actually, there are two Atoms running @ 500 Mhz. The Quark, presumably 'running' @ 100 Mhz, is not active for anyone, yet. This is not a show-stopper, but it does represent a 'wrinkle'.

The RTOS (real time operating system) from Wind River (subsidiary of Intel) was supposed to be ready year-end 2014... it is called ViperOS and is apparently not ready even now. I've been active on the Intel site today and still don't have an answer; and I'm not the only one (as you might imagine) who is painfully interested.

We are noticing that there are several devices showing up /dev/ttymcu0, /dev/ttymcu1, /dev/ttymcu2 and who knows what that means exactly... but they're apparently getting ready. Why is this important? Glad you asked. Hardware timiing 'in real time' requires an MCU (similar to Arduino, Atmega328) which is *very* precise. A process running in the gnu/linux user space is NOT precise enough. Sketches running in the Intel Edison all run as a process in the normal user address space in yocto linux. For certain hardware related timing considerations this is not cool, and requires interrupt tricks to work out. Certainly, I'm a bit disappointed at this development. I am encouraged, however, that the MCU availability is coming... sometime.

On a more positive note, my Intel Edison (dual core Atom 500 Mhz) computed PI today accurate to 10,000+ digits ( using python3, pdeclib.py, pilib.py, and Decimal ) in one minute twenty-five seconds (1m25s). For comparison, my Raspberry PI b+ (single core Arm 400 Mhz) came in @ one minute fifty-eight seconds (1m58s), and my Raspberry PI 2B (quad core Arm 700 Mhz) came in @ one Minute twelve seconds (1m12s). So, the little Edison compute module is holding its own; not bad.

The Edison is also quite stable (has been running on the network uninterrupted for more than a week clicking away on its 'sketch' ) keeping yocto linux alive; so far doing very well, and better than I really expected from such a platform. Its impressive. Now, if I could just use its MCU !

Cheers,
marcus