I am currently working on a project for one of my companies customers who is producing security equipment. We are now very close to define the hardware platform used for production and the Intel Edison made it onto the top of the list.
Why? Well firstly because of it’s nice form-factor, the ability to run ResinOS and the on-board WiFi + flash memory. But also because of the customer can tell his customers that there is an “Intel Inside”.
In terms of computation power it surely has more than enough - especially for our project.
I have been making quite some tests - also comparing the Intel Edison with Raspberry Pi (Compute Module would be a desired device for production).
The Edison was and is doing fine. But there are a lot of questions unanswered. Some of them are mainly there (I think) because of the fact that there is such a lack of documentation, blogposts, projects which are about the Intel Edison - and there isn’t such a large community like you have with the Raspberry.
So before I proceed would really like to know from the Resin-Team (I don’t want to notify 43 people so I am not directing this to someone) if they have experiences with the Edison.
What you think. Is the Edison a good choice? (in terms of quality, availability, resin-future-support, not project-depending stuff)
How long can I expect the Edison to be supported by Resin.io / ResinOS?
Might it be a better choice switching to Samsung Artik - but hey! I don’t really like those boards since in their documentation they do not even mention SPI - What the?
Really I appreciate any help I can get since this is a larger scale project and a wrongly chosen platform is a bad thing.
Hey @simonkemper, I have actually asked myself this question a few times, because the Edison has such a nice form factor and haven’t x86 architecture makes somethings a breeze to get working. However, I think as it stands, I wouldn’t use the Edison in a long term production project as it seems like the Edison is getting very little love from Intel these days as the focus more on the Intel Joule and Curie for IoT. We have seen very few updates on the Edison kernel and its yocto BSP, and I think points to it falling out of favour. Resin.io will continue to support the Edison for the foreseeable future, but currently there are no large production deployments using the Edison, so the support is mostly to enable hobbyists and makers.
The Artiks are pretty fun board, especially if you get a carrier board like the Kitra, but I haven’t looked into SPI for the board yet though. I all fairness, I think a RPI commute module with a decent bit of onboard eMMC or a customised RPI from Farnell might be the best option, but of course it depends on a number of other things like price point, what kinda performance or peripherals are needed, etc.
Hopefully this rambling has helped a little bit.
Cheers
Shaun
so it seems like we both asked ourselves the same questions. I really do like the Edison a lot and latest long-term test has proven that it fits into our project but I was afraid that in terms of long-term support the Edison is not a good choice.
It’s somehow such a pity because - as you wrote - the Edison has such a nice form factor - and did you know that it has an integrated 100MHz MCU to perform real-time tasks, sleep and wake of the Edison, etc.!? And what is most special about this MCU is that it is based on an Intel 486 - I remember when those CPUs came out - It was the time when we played Doom II Multiplayer over a serial-cable (null-modem-cable).
Concerning the Artik Boards - We have been working with an Artik 520 Dev Kit and I really liked it so far but Samsung just added the Artik 530 Board and it replaces a lot of documentation on the 520. I don’t understand why they are doing such things. It seems like there is minor interest in supporting an architecture / board that’s just a year behind it or so - So I do not really trust Artik or Samsung in long-term support.
All in all Artik and Edison both should take a look at how the people at Raspberry handle such things. They are way more open and long-term support is no problem at all. Take for example the Compute Module 3 - One could think it replaced the Compute Module 1 but it did not. You can get both in large batches if you want.
We are in contact with Farnell and talked about customization and although we meet the MOQ of 1000 customization costs are too high for our customer.
So I guess we stick with taking a compute module and adding WiFi by ourselves. Or we just use a RPi3 since the casing of the device is made of plastic and has some holes so WiFi Signal will still be strong - even with that internal antenna …
Hey @shaunmulligan I would like to share the following information I got when contacting the Intel Sales Support and asked them about the future of the Intel Edison.
Intel officially says that there is no EOL for the Edison. Quote from a separate forum post:
Thanks for your patience, we have been investigating and we would like to let you know that Intel doesn’t have an EOL date for the Intel Edison.
But I have also been in direct contact with one of those sales assistants.
However. As you wrote:
That really makes me think not to use the Edison - but unfortunately it’s a nice working little Platform and we have made test to prove its stability.
By the way - what are the most used boards or let’s say which board is used in the largest production deployment? That would be a great information for all of us I guess!
@simonkemper thanks for sharing, thats interesting to know and it is indeed a nice little platform for many use cases. In terms of used boards in the largest fleets on resin.io, the main 3 boards are RPI (version 3 is most used) , beaglebone black and the Intel NUC (mostly digital signage type apps). Hope that helps a little bit
@shaunmulligan Thanks for sharing! At least this is a very interesting information. But somehow I knew that the RPi is the one that’s most used. Beaglebone Black is however a surprise!
I wonder how do people deal with RPI missing CE certificate? Do they ignore it and deploy commercial products?
@shaunmulligan do you have more statistics on popularity of the products / platforms? Bit more places on the list would be usefull. I looked at Artik however I saw resin not being updated for Artik so I assume it is not very popular. Is that true?
Hey @llap,
As far as I know the RPI is CE certified, however that is for the RPI itself, if someone intends to incorporate the RPI into a product, they have to get the product as a whole CE certified, and this it what many of our customers do.
In terms of popularity of boards, the following list ranks the boards in amount of usage:
raspberrypi3
raspberry-pi2
raspberry-pi
intel-nuc
beaglebone-black
intel-edison
hummingboard
ts4900
up-board
jetson-tx2
iot2000
artik5
artik710
imx6ul-var-dart
beaglebone-green
nitrogen6x
odroid-xu4
Obviously this is not a direct reflection because some boards like the IOT2000 and Jetson TX2 were only recently added, but it at least gives you a good idea. It also doesn’t account for the fact that some users are using Beaglebone Greens and Blues in Beaglebone Black fleets (which is the direction we want to move any ways).
We also don’t have good numbers on customers using RPI compute module based boards, I know a number of users are using boards like the embeddedPi and IOT-GATE-RPi. But hopefully this give you some idea of what we see. We were pretty hopeful for the Artik boards, but we haven’t seen much uptake in them, which is the reason they don’t get updated as regularly as the other boards.
