Intel Edison generic calculator shield photo journal

[MarkHaysHarris777]

Greetings, ... still waiting on most of the blocks I ordered from Sparkfun; but the GPIO block came yesterday which has given me the opportunity to experiment with alternate power, and alternate GPIO configuration | access. The GPIO block expects either the battery block, or one of the console block(s) for power, so the GPIO block does not supply its own power:



The Edison requires a funky vSys power supply, because it is designed primarily to operate from a 4.4 volt lithium ion battery (a couple of the blocks have built-in chargers). vSys takes 3.15 to 4.5 (according to the hardware guide) and the mini breakout board takes the 9v down to 4.38v. I threw together a dual supply (7805 5v) and an (LM317T 4.3v); lower left. The GPIO block auto-level-shifts via solder jumper to either 3v3 or vSys... which makes it more like the RPi (at least from a GPIO standpoint); I'm still experimenting with the adafruit leveler.

The Intel SDK is minus Python support for the time being; so the options for development for yocto gnu/linux are C|C++ or Arduino IDE. Python is coming, probably in time for the MCU to be working.

The other option for the Intel Edison and Python is to dump yocto gnu/linux and install emutexlab's Ubilinux (debian variant) which not only supports Python, but also is a nicer all-around gnu/linux with package manager, and a host of other tools and goodies... the downside is that *more than a few* people have bricked their Edison doing the upgrade! (dumb user errors, of course, but I'm capable of those too... ) I think I'll wait on UbiLinux until my number two Edison gets here (I'll have one in each camp, and I can test in parallel that way).

Happy Easter Everyone!

Cheers,
marcus