Galileo is different, is it?

There a quite a number of Arduino boards available. The original Arduinos all used 8-bit AVR micro-controllers from Atmel. Recently Arduino adopted 32-bit ARM cores. In this post I want to look at the features of the Galileo board. The Board is about double the size of an original Arduino board and built around the Intel Quark X1000 controller.Galileo-circuitry_610x534 The Quark family of Intel chips are the new low cost line of x86 controllers that are positioned below the Atom cores.  Quarks are elementary particles that make up the atomic nucleus. Intel positions the Quark family for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The X1000 controller is the first member of this line. The X1000 offers:

  • 400 MHz 32-bit x86 CPU
  • 512 Kbyte ECC protected embedded SRAM
  • Up to 2Gbyte external ECC protected DDR3 memory
  • 10 /100 Mbps Ethernet port with RMI interface
  • 2 x PCI Express Rev 2.0 ports offering up to 2.5 GT/s data transfer rates
  • 2 x USB 2.0 Host ports
  • 1 x USB 2.0 Device port
  • SDIO card interface
  • 2 x I2C Master interfaces up to 400 Kbit/s
  • 16 x GPIO
  • 2 x SPI Master controllers
  • 2 x 16550 compliant UART supporting baud rates from 300 to 2764800
  • Real Time Clock (RTC)

The controller is packed into a Flip-Chip Ball Grid Array (FCBGA) package with 393 solder balls that come with a 0.593 mm ball pitch. The package dimensions are 15mm x 15mm. With this kind of a package hand soldering is out of the picture.
Noteworthy is the implementation of the Arduino shield interface. The interface is pretty much designed with external components. For the GPIO/PWM digital shield pins a Cypress CY8C9540A 40-Bit I/O Expander with EEPROM  is used. The analog shield pins use an Analog Device AD7298 8-Channel, 1 MSPS, 12-Bit SAR Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) with Temperature Sensor . The Quark controller uses I2C serial interface to control the PGIO/PWM CY8C9540A device and the SPI for the ADC AD7298.

Galileo is coming to town

Today I received my Intel Galileo board that I ordered sometimes in October from Mouser.  The shipment date was initially mid November but got pushed back a few times. Anyway, I was planning to toy around with it over the holidays and was thrilled when it shipped December 24th. Galileo must have called Santa and put in a good word.
The board comes in a nice box together with a power supply. I wish it had stand-offs to provide some support when sitting on a table. This would prevent the board from resting on the mini-PCI card slot tips mounted on the back-side of the board. Those tips look like they could easily break off.
Anyway I will try to document the journey to get the board up and running.
For the documentation and software just head over to www.intel.com/support/go/galileo and download the related build for your OS. Intel supports 32/64 bit Linux, Windows and MacOS-X. The release as of this writing is 1.5.3 and gets delivered as a Zip-archive.
Downloading the Windows version and unzipping it with the stock Windows un-zipper produced an error because of too long file names in git related files. Using 7-Zip however completed without a hick-up (see also the Galileo Getting Started Guide) .
The next step is to plug in the power supply and connect the Client-USB port with a micro USB cable to your computer.  Once the Galileo USB port is detected by your computer (it shows up under “Gadget 2.4”) you must install the related serial drive. It can be found in the IDE installation directory under  ./hardware/arduino/x86/tools/linux-cdc-acm.inf .  Now it is time to start the arduino IDE and perform a firmware update. You can find the menu entry under Help->Firmware Update.

Olimexino-STM32

I have played around with the Arduino and had fun with it. However I am accustomed to more powerful micro-controllers than the AVR CPU. So it was only a matter of time until I started to look for an ARM based board that offered Arduino shields.  One board that caught my attention was the Olimexino-STM32 board.
OLIMEXINO-STM32-01
It is a nice board that offers the following key features:

  • STM32F103RB based ARM CPU
  • SD-Card slot
  • Mini USB port
  • CAN bus
  • Wide range of supply 9-30V
  • Battery supply plug

The board is a derivative of the Maple board from LeafLabs and also supports their Arduino like IDE.

Arduino Due

A few years back at Maker Fair in San Mateo, California I came across an Arduino Duemilanove board.
Arduino Duemilanove
I have been playing and earning a living with micro controllers for more than two decades. So naturally I was curious to learn more about what was at the heart of the Arduino movement. What better way than just try it out.
What  interested me was the ability to combine the Arduino board with shields. Therefore I also picked up a few shields, among them a LoL Shield.
Installing the Arduino IDE  was easy and with all the source code available on the internet I was quickly up and running, playing around with LEDs, servos and sensors.
This ease of use was probably the main reason why Arduino quickly became popular in DYI circles.