SparkFun Intel Edison Board

I need to amend my previous post about the Intel Edison. It turns out it may not be the Edison module itself but rather the Intel Mini-Breakout Board that is at fault when t comes to at least the I2C failure. I still have to see about the SPI failures. Here’s why I have reached that conclusion:

I ordered some of the Sparkfun Blocks for Intel Edison© and went back to fooling with them. (Really I wasn’t ‘fooling’ with them as much as working on a project for a customer where Intel Edison was a good fit.) I downloaded some nice code from GitHub that made the I2C bus usable with the Sparkfun Blocks and Voilá! I had it working! I made some fairly substantial edits to the original code from the original GitHub repository, so I forked it and have re-published it on my own GitHub, of course. Mostly what I added were more startup and output options.

I’m now able to read I2C sensor data (I’m using the 9DOF Sparkfun block) and am now publishing the sensor data to … well, I can choose where I send it! I can send it to the build in Mosquito MQTT server, or to an embedded MongoDB NoSQL database, or to an external Couchbase NoSQL database, or I can publish my own raw JSON data from it. I may even make it possible to publish to all sources at once, but I’m not sure that’s all that useful, really.

Yeah, I’m generally a Java guy — hence the coffee beans — but I reverted to C for this one. It’s been 30 years since I’ve written any serious C code, but apparently it’s like riding a bike because it comes right back!

Stay tuned for the rest of the story on this project, because it’s going to get better and better!