A week or two ago I got an email from someone at the computer information science department at university of oregon telling all students that intel was coming to show off their new product called the Edison. My first reaction was, shouldn’t they be showing it off to someone who buys more hardware, like sony, dell, or even apple? After not thinking much of the email, I continued my day, but did leave the event lingering in my head. Currently then I was/am intrigued by arduino microcontrollers and raspberry pi microcomputers, and I just bought a arduino uno in december of 2013. Later that day I found myself with some spare time and was able to go back to the email about intel read more. I watched a video of the to be presenter at another conference a week before. He was very excited and for good reason. Intel developed (or rather this man and his team made) an arduino and a pi together on a board the size of a sd card, and yes it works as an sd card too. This made my eyes wide. Most of my arduino projects were cool, but really only to me because I excited about the possibility of programing real things, but now with this device, you could bring the coolness of wifi and computers and also the coolness of robotic functions that the arduino handles. It seemed like the need for a board like this is growing day by day, and it looks like intel nailed it. Now being a hobbyist, the board looks like a pain to wire, but maybe you don’t need to with wifi. But the small size of the board will allow for enormous steps of innovation with hardware devices that interact with smartphones. here are a few pictures I snapped while he passed it around.
As you can see they went all out with compactness. It is tiny. Its sd card size makes my brain wonder about endless possibilities of future possible projects… and what the world will be like in 20 years. Its really cool and kinda scary stuff. I am not sure if I will like to live with everything having a chip in it, but it’s definitely the future, so its exciting to see what practical uses we can come up with using such a small but powerful computer. I know an influx of smartphone compatible device will soon flood the market, I hope to find some genius here. I think I will buy this or something close to it and practice linking hardware and mobile software. I will post more on this as I get into it. I think I might start with a flashlight and an iphone.
Thanks for reading!!