Edison on XBee socket?
Rayman
Posts: 14,653
I have this idea for a product, but not sure if it makes any sense...
Thought I'd see if anyone has thoughts on it...
The Intel Edison is very interesting to me in terms of it's Wifi and Bluetooth capabilities.
It's pretty powerful inside but pretty lame in terms of I/O.
I do think it would be very nice as a serially controlled device.
It's a hair bigger than XBee, but not too much bigger.
I'm thinking about an XBee socket adapter that mates to Edison.
Hoping that it would be useful with just DI and DO connected to Propeller.
May have to provide a USB port for flashing the OS. Might also see if a uSD socket would fit on it...
Anyway, if this thing existed and worked, one could plug it into Activity board or other Prop boards with XBee socket...
Thought I'd see if anyone has thoughts on it...
The Intel Edison is very interesting to me in terms of it's Wifi and Bluetooth capabilities.
It's pretty powerful inside but pretty lame in terms of I/O.
I do think it would be very nice as a serially controlled device.
It's a hair bigger than XBee, but not too much bigger.
I'm thinking about an XBee socket adapter that mates to Edison.
Hoping that it would be useful with just DI and DO connected to Propeller.
May have to provide a USB port for flashing the OS. Might also see if a uSD socket would fit on it...
Anyway, if this thing existed and worked, one could plug it into Activity board or other Prop boards with XBee socket...
Comments
I've see the 3.3 V Prop interface with 5.0 V chips with just series resistors...
I think the Prop will see 1.8 V as logic 1. Edison I/O can sink/source 3 ma, so should be fine with 10k resistors...
It should; the Propeller input threshold is 1.65v.
Have you given further thought to this?
What we really need is an ActivityBoard with Dual-XBee sockets (one for XBee, another for USB FTDI chip or some other serial device). I've begged Parallax to consider this ... to no avail of course.
I suppose an ActivityBoard with a switch for selecting where the DI/DO goes might be a useful alternative, but it would offer less flexible utility.
I sure do miss the APPMOD connector that was on the Basic Stamp boards.
Sparkfun has a program where useful designs can be "published" ... something to think about.
I'm going to assume that an Edisson can run programs like openspin and the propeller loader. That it can serve up a WEB IDE in which Spin code can be written, edited and sent back to the Edisson for compilation and loading to the Propeller.
If that is so then it sounds great. A really smart PropPlug.
We can already so this with a web IDE running on other devices like cheap WIFI routers ans Raspi's so why not the Edisson?
There appears to be a at least 3 serial interfaces to the Edison. Right now, I'm thinking about which one makes the most sense to connect to Prop via DI/DO on xbee socket.
One interface gives you console access where you can login as root and fun stuff like that.
Another one lets you load code (AKA sketches) to be run.
There's also a couple other ones that you can access via those sketches.
I'm thinking right now that the later would make the most sense, but don't know for sure...
I think you'd use the Edison breakout to load the sketches and have the sketch code talk to the Propeller.
What I see this useful for is just basic I/O to WiFi or Bluetooth. Hopefully, it wouldn't be too hard to have a sketch that makes it act similar to other Wifi or Bluetooth modules with serial interfaces...
I suppose what I should do is see if Sparkfun would make this... They appear to be developing a whole line of Edison stuff...
Saw something saying the software only works with the Arduino board and not the breakout board, maybe that's my problem.
But, the serial console may be a better interface anyway. Was able to get wifi going and download stuff.
I'm thinking that if I can get ymodem installed, I'll be able to send files back and forth between Propeller and Edison.
Also, you can run javascript, C or python programs from the command line and interact that way...
Anyway, the Arduino software seems not quite ready for anything but the Arduino board.
But, I think I can just as easy go in through the front door and get the wifi access I'd want...