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by egorf 3383 days ago
I have worked closely with Intel Edison for quite some time. For $50 it's quite alright, if you take built in wifi onto account.

The real problem is lack of Intel's support. Edison runs an ancient kernel, the yocto image source is full of hacks, which do not suggest big interest in prolonging the device's actuality. Instead, Intel decided to add Arduino compatibility to a x86 Linux board, god knows why.
2 comments
ja27 3383 days ago
> Edison runs an ancient kernel, the yocto image source is full of hacks, which do not suggest big interest in prolonging the device's actuality.

This killed it for me. I have one through Hackster.io and the first two projects I attempted bogged down in "need to compile this common package from source and hack it up to try to get it working" land. Meanwhile on a Raspberry Pi the same packages are an apt-get away.

I've been asked many times why someone would choose an Edison and the best answer I have is "if you really, really need to use an Intel board" and even then there are better solutions from them.

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foxylad 3383 days ago
You can buy ESP8266 boards with wifi built in for less than $3, so wifi doesn't justify the price tag. The Edison is certainly a lot more more powerful, but most IOT applications simply don't need that power. And if you do, Raspberry Pi Zero is still far cheaper.

But this actually proves your larger point that Intel just aren't that interested. If they were, they would sell Edison at a loss for $5, which would spawn huge community support around them.

Intel they are suffering the classic innovator's dilemma, where competitors grab the low-end with products so cheap that no-one cares about their inferiority. The competitors then slowly improve their products (see the ESP32) and gobble up most of the market. Inel will rule the high end for a while yet, but I think they recognise they have already lost the low end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

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Nexxxeh 3382 days ago
I'm assuming you already know, but in case you don't, there's now the Pi Zero W. Less than £10, but it's a Pi Zero with wifi (802.11n) and Bluetooth (4.1) with integrated antenna.
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pjmlp 3383 days ago
Even better the ESP32.

It's 512 KB are more than enough for most applications.

After all it was enough for having MS-DOS, Turbo Pascal development environment back in the day, just as example.

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