Per https://communities.intel.com/thread/116434, the Intel Curie microcontroller, which is resident on the UDOO x86 and Arduino 101, has been sunset by Intel. General "community support" will cease this year, the CODK has been frozen, and I expect no official engineering support from Intel from this point forward. (The poor documentation will remain poor, and the bad arduino library support will remain bad) Documentation will remain available until 2020. Hopefully some of the docs they've kept behind closed doors will come out to public view.
Are you really that surprised though? I can't say I am. Intel has really screwed up their entries into the "hackerspace" realm between Edison/Joule and Curie. Bad public documentation, lazy tutorials and examples that simply tell you to connect the board and "now you're ready," libraries with API documentation that says "just look at the code to figure out how it works," making you sign NDAs if you want detailed data. Oh, and let's talk about the high prices. The use of the Arduino framework for Curie was a great step forward, if only it worked right. Intel is a real piece of work. It's sad because I really believe the hardware is top notch. Now I'm just waiting for them to cancel RealSense. Then they will have canceled all of their products I have invested in.
@Wilson, I'm afraid that this might mean UDOO's X86 (or Arduino 101) will follow the Neo, where the 'promise' is that it is an Arduino, but any more advanced library fails to work, therefore making it not so usefull as a maker platform.
If I were to take a cynical view then the remaining Arduino 101 Intel stock may have been shifted by including it in the UDOO's x86 given Intel have pulled out of the wearable market. If I were even more cynical the same could apply to the Braswell cpu .
I bought the UDOO x86 for a specific purpose and that included the need for the 101 (or really any SPI-enabled Arduino compatible) as a coprocessor. This doesn't affect me at all because my intended application will work fine. Intel's delivery never kept pace with their marketing BS. I'm glad I didn't invest in any of their pricier boards like the Joule or Galileo. Honestly I'm not sure what their intent was, but it couldn't have been to make money.
Yes - I'm sure UDOO X86 will shortly also be discontinued under supply pressure of the Curie. Unless "Intel is actively working with alternative manufacturers to continue to make the Arduino 101* development board available to the market." means that Intel is actively working to hand off the Curie to another company too. Seemingly unlikely though since the Quark MCUs that the Curie is based on have not been discontinued - yet - meaning Intel is far less likely to release their intellectual property for third party Curie production without the typical super strict and cost prohibitive license from Intel. Still - one can dream.
The Curie module that UDOO x86's discontinue notice is here http://qdms.intel.com/dm/i.aspx/43A2E4E9-B349-4FF6-AB6B-237BE2F07D2C/FPCN115578-00.pdf Last date to order is 1/17/2018, last date to ship 7/17/2018.
There a quite few stability/reliability issues with Arduino 101 especially with i2c and wire libraries (some defects open for months) and there is little chance of these being resolved, so keep that in mind if anyone plans to develop with it.
This is exactly my worry. These kind of problems made the Neo much less usable, and UDOO doesn't seem to be able to solve them, and neither give the community enough information to solve them.
The problems @jas-mx are referencing are with Intel's Arduino libraries and their compatibility with the Curie - UDOO is not responsible for that. Unfortunately neither Ardunio nor Intel believe they are responsible to fix the general Arduino 101 problems either. And Intel will never provide enough information for the community to resolve the problem without a big fat NDA, guaranteed. So much for open source. This is why Intel will never earn any money or loyalty from the "maker" and "university" communities.
UDOO were responsible for deciding which Arduino product to include on the x86, given that Curie never gained market transaction you would have thought that they would have done their due diligence by selecting an mcu which had better support to begin with. Furthermore it doesn't make sense to hardwire a wearable mcu to an SBC, it primary features such a battery powered, IMU and BLE aren't really exploited. Being low power the mcu conserves power by running at a low clock rate (32Mhz), for the same BOM I am sure a higher clocked MCU could have been selected. I suspect the way the deal was done for UDOO x86 meant that only Intel chips could be selected. This partly driven by that the fact Intel would want students to leave University with experience of their platform as way of recommendations of their mcu in industry.
I purchased the UDOO x86 to have a Win 10 SBC. I was not concerned about the Arduino support. However, since placing that order last December, I have become involved in a Raspberry Pi 3 project and have started to appreciate the "maker" market a little more. Perhaps UDOO should drop the Arduino support and become its own, standalone maker board by implementing a full set of GPIO pins, SPI, PWM, etc. Create a Win 10 library similar to the BCM2835 library I used on the RPi3. This configuration might tempt a lot of Windows developers, who have no interest in learning Linux, to enter the maker market. If UDOO would give me the ability to use the standard Windows developer's environment like Visual Studio with a robust set of API calls to manage the "maker" side of things, UDOO might just create a whole new market of "WinMakers." At the same time, UDOO would need to also offer a couple of "hats" for relays, stepper motor drivers, etc. Also, I noticed the makers of the Latte Panda, are selling a 32bit version of that borad with a licensed copy of 32bit Windows 10 pre-installed at a very good price. This may be something to consider. I have trouble understanding why dedicated maker projects need a 64 bit architecture and more than 4 gigs of memory. Charlie
What? No Linux? I haven't run Windows for years and I intend to keep it that way. Whatever should be done it should be cross platform.
Nothing in my post indicated that I did not want the board to run Linux. It can run as many OS versions as the chip set supports. I just want to be able to access a full set of GPIO pins, PWM, SPI, COM and similar directly from a Windows development environment and not need to tack on an Arduino to get those functions. Right now the UDOO folks are going to have to immediately buy thousands of the Intel Curie processors to have a supply to keep making the current x86 board or they will need to redesign the board. It has been suggested that UDOO has an agreement with Intel requiring their x86 board ONLY use Intel chips if they want to continue to get low prices on the Intel SOC. Unfortunately, the third option is to just drop the x86 board altogether and chalk it up to yet another Kick Starter project that failed. Charlie
The co founder of Arduino says on Twitter Arduino 101 is going to stay: https://mobile.twitter.com/mbanzi/status/890960931668316160
