Hello friends,
I'm not the best person to judge, because i don't have the biggest experience with drones (working on it as hard as i can though :) ), but this could be interesting. I'm not sure if the hardware inside is the best suited for applications delivered by APM or Pixhawk, but the size and weight is definitely an upside of Edison. Same sized IMU, GPS and some other sensors and this could be the next ultimate Autopilot, couldn't it?
I am really excited about this little guy. It could push forward a lot of new products to market, and i have a little hunch that it could be a good solution for drones.
It has an onboard WiFi and a Bluetooth, so it could improve the communication between drone and ground station (for ex. substitution for micro usb cable, short range telemetry, or even direct drone to drone communication).
Also, it provides a low-power 22nm 400MHz Intel® Quark processor with two cores (don't know how that stands vs ARM that's on board of Pixhawk, I hope that someone with the knowledge will clear this issue for all of us)
more on the subject:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/edison.html
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/06/intel-edison/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlgmO1Keb5w
What do You think?
Best to all of You and a Happy New Year!
Comments
Thank God it does not run windoze...
More CPU power is always good though. Amazingly even with the Pixhawk which is 10x faster than the APM's AVR 2560 the dev team's plans to switch to an extended kalman filter + run the main copter loops at 400hz eats significantly into the CPU. Once we do that we end up running the Pixhawk at about 60% (maybe a little higher).
Of course 40% remaining is still a good bit left..but I can already see a day within the next 2 years that we will want even more CPU.
Why worry about the Edison, when ARM is here today with many gig+ cpus. Intel lost the tiny mobile market a long time ago.
I think in this case price should be consern for makers or diy comunities. Forsure it will open up many possibilities for unmanned aerial industry
It seems a very worthwhile evolution of the Atom and further cements tiny Linux computers as the path for a lot of future development.
Add one of these to the APM or Pixhawk and you could start taking on 3D path finding SLAM solutions for ground relative navigation.
I note that currently some of our developers are working with the TI based Gumstix Linux platforms in addition to BeagleBone and Odroid so we are moving very solidly in the direction of a much more powerful Linux platform already.
Really interesting stuff ahead.
Looks really promising,I`m no expert though but I like the idea of powerful miniaturised components. Who know were it will end.
Intel stole this from Start Trek....AKA Iso linear chip :)
Chuck,
Great to read your comment! With this size it would be nice to have several slots for Edison, for ex. back up. I wonder what the price will it have.
Greg
I was looking at that as well and thinking the same thing - if someone designs board/case to allow that to plug in which contains your gyro, accel, barometer, magno, etc it looks like it's some powerful processing