Unboxing Intel Edison

Intel Developer Forum is underway right now at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. At yesterday’s kickoff, it was clear that Intel sees a lot of potential in Edison, its brand new Linux-based system-on-module, which was originally announced at CES earlier this year. The board itself is small, a little larger than a postage stamp and has some nice specs: dual core, dual threaded 500 MHz Atom processor and a 32-bit Quark processor running at 100 MHz. It has 1 gigabyte of RAM, 4 gigabytes of on-board flash memory (eMMC), wifi, bluetooth, and 40 GPIO.

Accessing those teeny tiny GPIO pins would be a challenge without the help breakout boards. Intel is providing one that has Arduino pin compatibility and another that’s much smaller for more advanced hardware developers. Our friends at Sparkfun Electronics also introduced a line of breakouts, one of which has pin compatibility with the Raspberry Pi:

We were lucky enough to get our hands on a few of the boards, and until we can do a thorough review of them, check out the unboxing video above. You can see the Edison, its Arduino breakout, and compare it in size to Raspberry Pi’s equivalent product, the Compute Module.

If you would like to give one a try yourself, you can get them in the Makershed!