Intel Edison vs Arduino

[Joe San]

I just got to know about Intel's Edison and I'm wondering how different it is to the Arduino. Is the Edison a micro controller like the Arduino? I started playing with my Arduino kit and trying to come up with some IoT stuff and slowly realising that Intel's Edison might be a better choice. Is there anyone here using Edison? Could you please post a brief overview of the differences and the similarities to Arduino?

[Jan Cumps]

They are very different. The Arduino has a tiny microcontroller. The Edison sports a dual core processor.
Check the specs of both. Virtually all parameters are different with an order of magnitude or more.

[Joe San]

Looks to me like the Intel Edison is like a RasPi + Arduino as per my understanding:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/edison.html

[Joe San]

I'm basically trying to do this alarm:

http://makezine.com/projects/pir-sensor-arduino-alarm/

Connecting this Arduino alarm to my Raspberry Pi where I will have Akka Actors receiving messages from the Arduino kit and using WebSockets relay that to any interested clients. I'm now starting to think if I could do all this just with a Raspberry Pi instead of the Arduino. Not sure what is the benefit of using Arduino!

[Joe San]

Here is what I was looking for but it is much more comprehensive and sort of ready to use!

http://makezine.com/projects/pilarm-portable-raspberry-pi-room-alarm/

[Karthik Shiraly]

Joe Harry wrote:I'm now starting to think if I could do all this just with a Raspberry Pi instead of the Arduino.

I agree. For this particular project, Arduino doesn't add any obvious value.

Joe Harry wrote:Not sure what is the benefit of using Arduino!

From my experiences on my own hobbyist projects, I use the following guidelines to score if a microcontroller (like arduino) is a good idea in a project that already has a SBC ("single board computer", like RPi / Beaglebone...)

- If there are analog inputs and the SBC does not have analog pins (such as the RPi).
A simple ADC circuit may be good enough but my scale tips towards a mc if project also meets one or more additional criteria below.

- If the project is mostly powered by power banks or battery packs, and low current draw is good enough most of the time.
The best example is video surveillance where initial probable motion is detected by mc using PIR sensor, which then then switches on the SBC for video recording or image processing.
None of the SBCs I have has any kind of low power mode that I know of (I'm not certain about this, it may only be my ignorance).

- If project has hard or soft real time constraints.
I've noticed this problem particularly with servos, because their motion is directly proportional to accuracy of pulse width.
With RPi using simple time.sleep(), the motion is visibly jittery and I have to resort to using pigpio or servoblaster which rely on DMA instead of OS timing.
With arduinos, this has never been a problem. I don't think arduino Atmels are actually realtime by design, but their simplicity means their working is quasi-realtime and that's good enough for me.

[Joe San]

Is anyone aware of any sort of Workshops that I could participate? I'm so eager to do this with some support. I mean, I need some help and guidance to carefully build the complete solution. I need guidance at all levels right from choosing the hardware, the case to hold the set up, the drilling. At the moment the only thing that I could do on my own is the programming bit. It would be a lot better for me if I could do that as part of some guided workshop. Is there anything like that?