Emutex was involved in the development of the Intel® Edison Kit for Arduino, providing its expertise and knowledge at all project levels.

INTRODUCTION

Our client contracted Emutex to contribute to the development of Intel® Edison Kit for Arduino. The goal was to enable Arduino users to work with Edison using the same Arduino IDE and software API that was common to other Arduino boards.

WHAT IS INTEL® EDISON

Intel® Edison is a System on Module (SoM) which integrates a dual-core Atom CPU, a Quark MCU, WiFi and Bluetooth, 1GB RAM and 4GB flash, in a package not much bigger than a postage stamp. When coupled with an Intel® Edison Kit for Arduino, it also provides digital and analog I/O in a form factor that supports Arduino shields, making it a compelling platform for makers.

EMUTEX'S CONTRIBUTION

When the Edison Kit for Arduino was designed, Emutex was engaged to help to put the necessary software support in place. Here are some of the ways in which Emutex provided its expertise:

• Reviewed board schematics and validated pre-production board samples, providing feedback identifying hardware-level issues and improvements.
• Developed and integrated kernel drivers for I/O features such as PWM and ADC.
• Developed the Edison board support layer for the Arduino software libraries, ensuring API compatibility to support existing Arduino applications.
• Integrated the Edison toolchain and software libraries with the Arduino IDE

Despite the challenging timeframe set for this project, the Edison module and Arduino Kit were successfully launched at Maker Faire Rome 2014. Emutex was on hand to demonstrate and promote the Edison with enticing demonstrations, such as this one, created by our own engineers.

UBILINUX FOR EDISON

At the beginning, the only officially supported Linux distribution was a Yocto-derived Linux build provided by Intel®; due to the high demand of a debian-based distribution for Intel® Edison, Emutex decided to create ubilinux™ 2.0.

ubilinux™ 2.0 is an embedded Linux distribution, based on Debian Wheezy. It was tailored specifically for the Edison platform, providing the necessary kernel, drivers, libraries and applications to support the features of the Edison board; and, of course, providing easy access to the vast selection of Debian software packages available for 32-bit x86 platforms.

Creating a Debian-based distro for Intel Edison, along with suitable installation mechanism, was not a trivial task. Some of the surmounted challenges included a boot-loader which was non-standard (for x86 platforms) and lacked support for booting from removable media, on-board flash with partition size and layout restrictions, and for the inclusion of specific drivers, libraries and system configuration not normally provided by a Debian Wheezy distribution.

CONCLUSION

This is just one example of the work that Emutex has done to enable customers to bring new hardware designs to life with software. For other examples, and to learn more about the services and solutions that Emutex can provide, please visit our website at www.emutex.com.