Intel discontinues galileo, joule, and edison

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The Edison was a product with huge potential. Smallest SOC in a form factor that made it super easy to integrate into products. My biggest gripe was Intel's lack of software support. The MCU on the Edison was supposed to provide a hard-real time processor that shared memory with the higher level linux system. It could have been great for using the MCU to communicate with sensors, servos, and other devices, much like a Teensy, and then use the linux system for doing the higher level workloads making use of that I/O capability. But the RTOS Intel used for the MCU had severe shortcomings, especially with timing, and was never really updated to the best of my knowledge.
 
I think that's what we see time and again.

Hardware is hard, but that's just the beginning. It takes a lot of effort, foresight, and diligence to create an ecosystem that makes people productive when using it.
I would have written off arduino altogether by now, if Paul hadn't made huge improvements to the libraries. Doing a project in arduino is difficult for a beginner, but nearly impossible if the underlying libraries cannot be trusted to work.
 
Intel appears to have spent more money, a *lot* more, on advertising these products than PJRC has ever made on all Teensy models combined.

It's a terrible shame they didn't spend even a fraction of that money on software development and documentation.
 
I looked at the first generation of Intel boards, and I lost interest in it once I learned that all digital/analog IO was done through i2c (and slow i2c at that). In particular, not being able to drive the WS2812B/neopixel LEDs was the mark of death.
 
I completely agree here - I also liked the Edison, as it was nice form factor, I liked being able to program it wirelessly.

I also worked with them and made contributions to the MRAA library and for example was able to speed up some of the IO operations. But what killed it for me, was their lack of support. I got tired of waiting for them to maybe fix things like SPI and GPIO and...

Like they would refuse to say what fixes may or may not be in the next release or even a clue on when there might be a release. They would say things like, I have been told that "the" SPI issue has been resolved internally.... But not tell you what "the" was. Was it that SPI would hang? Was it that it only ran at maybe 5% speed of what they said it would or???

It is also unclear what they mean? Example there is thread up on Edison forum, asking about long-term availability of Edison as there are products produced (or being produced) that use them. Some interesting tidbits up there include:

We would like to let you know that the information available is that Intel doesn’t have EOL date for the Intel Edison as it was mentioned above.

The EOL Product Change Notification that you linked to, only applies to the LPOF (Low Power) variant of Edison and not the SPOF (Standard Power) variant.

Moreover, I would like to let you know that Intel does not discuss anything about roadmaps or future plans for any product.
Now back to playing around with a product that is well suppported (Teensy :D )
 
Intel does not know what "makers" need and want. And they showed that a) they're not really interested, or b) they're in their "god-mode" still and think makers silently accept all what they do.
 
Though luck for some retailers, especially Sparkfun. They really jumped on this whole Intel IoT thing with a whole line of add-on boards. A quick check shows that their inventory is still full with all these Intel boards. I suspect it must have been a commercial deal with Intel, because to any experienced maker it was clear this bloated ecosystem was doomed to fail.
 
I had a joule, it is great in that it connects directly to Azure with no programming, it has a good graphical interface, built in bluetooth wifi, hdmi out, supports a USB keyboard and mouse all with no coding. it should have been sold as a PC , not as an IoT device.
I'm more comfortable with my teensy 3.2 and my teensy 3.5 if i want more serial ports.
The digital IO and libraries available on the teensy beat the joule hands down.
 
Yep - Although there are boards sort of similar to at lesaat the Joule. I know that for example:

Trossen Robotics with their newer Turtlebot 2i robot, they went from using the Joule to using a NUC (Intel board)

I currently have a couple boards differet UP boards from UP, which you can purchase from: https://up-shop.org/ or a few of them can be purchased from Mouser.
My UP squared kickstarter board arrived yesterday.

I would not be surprised if the new Robotis Turtlebot 3 robotis (Waffle) might be moving over from Joule to UP... Or at least that was hinted to me... Will be interesting to see after they release it...
 
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