Joe Freeman: Tech, Teams, Trade-offs

The Intel Galileo is one of the more frustrating embedded / small system boards I've worked with.  I'm really not sure what Intel was thinking.  It feels like one of those "we need to get into this market" types of projects that is an off target response to ARMs penetration in the home hobbyist / small systems market. Intel has some work to do if they are serious about this board.  I suspect they will abandon it and try again with some other product. We've seen other projects from companies that have attempted to do the same thing.  The Microsoft .Net Micro Framework with the associated 2-3 board makers come to mind.  It was too small a market for Microsoft to commit any resources too. They open-sourced .NET MF and let it go fallow for at least two years. Pros Intel did a great job hacking the Arduino IDE to make it easy to build and run Arduino style sketches without any real knowledge of how the board works. There is 8MB of flash memory. It uses a po...

Developers have confusing array of ways to communicate with the Intel Galileo embedded board.  This is partially because the board wants to look like an Arduino while at the same time letting developers make use of the much  larger hardware provided by the Intel platform.  There are probably 4 main areas for communication Programming the board with the IDE. Communication between the board and a host computer using the Arduino library. Administration  and monitoring of the board's embedded Linux operating system. Communicating between the board and other systems using network or other Linux level capabilities. This chart describes the main channels of communication.  The Arduino IDE and Arduino Serial device are mapped to the USB port. The USB port does not support any type of multi-channel composite device.  This means you can only communicate with the underlying Linux system if you build a custom serial port cable or connect via Ethernet.  T...