The Intel® Galileo board is ideal for Internet of Things (IoT) projects, helping you improve the scope and function of your IoT projects. Whether you’re an embedded systems expert or an IoT enthusiast, you want to use the right resources to build your project. You want to maintain a balance between the investment you make while building your project and the function and features the final project will offer. The Intel® Galileo board is one of the most powerful IoT boards in the industry, and it can handle all your IoT needs, big or small. This article looks at some of applications for which the it would come in handy. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to make an informed decision when you purchase your hardware.
Figure 1. The Intel® Galileo board is ideal for Internet of Things projects.
IoT Applications with Heavy Server-Side Apps
For IoT projects, you can use the main board as a client or a server depending on your project’s design. When you use the board as a client, it works in conjunction with web-based applications hosted on online servers. The board uses GET and POST requests to send data to the applications, and receives data from the applications in JavaScript* Object Notation format or plain text by Ethernet or Wi-Fi (if you have installed a Wi-Fi card on your board).
If your project involves heavy data transfer, you’ll need a reliable board on your side. With its powerful 400 MHz 32-bit Intel Quark SoC X1000 application processor, the Intel® Galileo board can receive and send data at high speeds. It’s high clock speed allows it to execute more instructions at a time, reducing instances of data loss caused by timeout errors. Other boards that use microprocessors with slower clock speeds usually take longer to save and retrieve data, so accessing data from online servers takes longer as well, which can lead to data loss during large data transfers.
When you use your board as a web server, the web app is normally stored in the board’s flash memory or on an SD card mounted on the board. You can then access the web app over a wired network or the Internet. Many IoT boards are capable of this kind of application, but not all of them have sufficient storage space to accommodate large web apps, or lack the resources to run them efficiently.
The Intel® Galileo board, however, was made for such applications. It has ample space in its flash memory (8 MB) in which you can store web app code, but if you need more, you can store the code in an onboard 32 GB SD card. Moreover, the 256 MB of RAM gives the Intel® Galileo board enough space to handle data during runtime.
Interaction with Other Intel® Boards
Intel makes several open source boards, such as Intel® Edison. Unlike many other open source boards on the market, Intel boards support different programming languages, such as C++, and integrated development environments, such as Arduino* and Node.js*. Moreover, if you want to send output from the Intel® Galileo board to the Intel® Edison board by serial port, you can do so in text format, and the intel® Edison board will be able to access the data regardless of whether you used Arduino or Node.js to program it. This seamless transfer of data is made possible by the publisher-subscriber model used to share data between different programs running on Linux*.
Image- and Face-Recognition Applications
Image- and face-recognition applications aren’t easy to create on most IoT boards because they don’t support programming environments capable of performing such tasks. You can use the Intel® Galileo board for image processing, however, because it supports the OpenCV. OpenCV is an open source library specifically designed for machine learning and computer vision. Using it, you can build advanced IoT projects such as a centralized facial-recognition system.
A good example of a facial-recognition project you can create with the Intel® Galileo board is a room population monitor. To build such a project, use OpenCV in C++ to get the number of faces in a segment of camera footage, then pass the data to an Arduino* application. The Arduino application then sends the data in the form of a text file to a web server that you have used Node.js* to create. This way, you can monitor the number of people in a room from a remote location over the Internet.
Using Arduino*-Compatible Shields
The Intel® Galileo board is compatible with the Arduino* UNO R3 pin configuration, so you can mount any Arduino-compatible shield on the Intel® Galileo board with no extra hardware or software necessary. This compatibility makes project development faster and cheaper, and many affordable Arduino-compatible shields are available on the market.
Typically, the Intel® Galileo board operates on 3.3 V core voltage, so it will work with 3.3 V rated Arduino shields by default. If you want to use the Intel® Galileo board with a 5 V–rated shield, you’ll have to adjust the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) voltage to 5 V. Intel provides a jumper on the board that changes the GPIO to from 3.3 V to 5 V; all you have to do is change the jumper position.
Other Applications
In addition to the applications this article discussed, you can use the Intel® Galileo board in many other areas, depending on the scope of your project. By adding shields and different sensors compatible with Arduino*, you can add even more functions and build robust, interconnected systems for the Internet of Things.
Additional Reading:
- Visit the Intel® Galileo board web site to learn more.
- Explore the IoT gateway offerings to compare features and necessities.
- Visit the Intel Developer Zone web site to learn more about Intel IoT Technology.
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