Re: Where it went wrong?
No, I can tell you where it went wrong. The documentation for these products sucked. Absolutely sucked. Distributors initially were selling the Edison and the Galileo so fast they couldn't keep them on the shelves, then people tried to return them because other than the demo they could not write firmware due to lousy docs. You couldn't even get the SPI to interface to an external EEPROM.
The quality of these devices are/were excellent. While these products weren't the cheapest, you got a ton of power in a small footprint. But Intel also made some stupid mistakes. Like on the Galileo Rev 1, you had to power the board first, then connect the USB connector to your PC. If you did it the other way around, you blew the board.
I had a direct line to Intel last year & I was working on the Intel Quark. The lawyers and the accountants have taken over the company. Getting proper phone or email support absolutely required knowing the design engineer's person's personal email address and conversing privately, and even then you only got part of the story.
IMO, Intel's reputation in Embedded is done. First they discontinued all their embedded microcontrollers in 1993 and screwed over lots of customers, some I knew & went out of business. Then they tried XScale and despite spending $35M in marketing they could not penetrate Embedded because too many people remembered getting screwed in 1993. A few other failures, then the Atom mess, now these very very high profile devices. No word yet on if the Quark will be discontinued.
I don't see how a responsible engineer could trust an Intel sourcing decision.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
