Microsoft makes Raspberry Pi its preferred IoT dev board A little over a year after Intel's Galileo development board got its first taste of Microsoft Windows, Redmond has decided to pull the project. Chipzilla's Raspberry Pi-like Galileo was anointed as able-to-run-Windows in August 2014, courtesy of the 1.0.2 firmware update for the Gen1 device. In the same month Intel launched …
Before it was Windows Phone 7, then Windows 8 and the don't call it Metro "TIFKAM" interface, then Windows RT, followed shortly after by the fiasco that is the Windows 10 and its privacy settings.
Now they've basically turned a whole heap of dev boards they gave out to people into bricks (from a Microsoft perspective). The only way to make those boards useful now is to put on a Unix-like OS such as Linux or BSD.
Is it safe to depend on anything this company produces?
If shooting one's self was an Olympic sport, the United States could expect to win gold this year just on Microsoft's efforts alone!
I suspect that the number of people who will be affected by this can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
That must be the downvotes on my initial post. Probably will be augmented by some downvotes on this post too.
Richard made a good point too: the Galileo has no native video hardware. Not sure how well Windows runs headless, but it must've been obvious to Microsoft devs that nothing will make the Galileo board sprout a HDMI port.
So why did they choose it in the first place? Why did they not give away the Pi 2 instead?
I've done WinCE development and it was dreadful - if that's anything to go by.
AMEN to that! Windows is bad to develop on, but Windows CE is outright horrid!
"The only way to make those boards useful now is to put on a Unix-like OS such as Linux or BSD."
That was always the case.
Seriously, why would anyone want to put Windows onto one of these devices? It's not even Windows (as we know it). I've done WinCE development and it was dreadful - if that's anything to go by.
But with Linux, I can develop + run on my workstation then cross-compile (or even compile on the device) without much consideration.
So what would putting "Windows" on these devices give me?
Several things wrong with this article, first, um, the Galileo is definitely not a Raspberry Pi board, it is definitely an Arduino board.
And, as I work for a distributor that sells Intel products, I can tell you that the Galileo is one of our best selling single-board computers. I have not seen an EOL notice on the Galileo.
Also, the Galileo is not recommended as a platform for running Windows 10, but Intel promotes that to show that the board is 100% compatible with Windows software which is very significant in the embedded market.
> Intel promotes that to show that the board is 100% compatible with Windows software which is very significant in the embedded market.
That is somewhat misleading:
"""The Galileo datasheet mentions Windows as a compatible operating system. This actually refers to the host PC that is used to program Galileo. The host can be a Mac, or a computer running Windows or Linux. Intel has provided development tools for the host PC to run on Windows, Linux, or a MAC. Compilers for each of these host environments (called "cross compilers") are free. The Galileo itself comes with an Arduino Linux distribution."""
It is "100% compatible" to the extent that you can write 'Arduino' software on a Windows PC and have it run on Galileo, but you can write that software on any machine (probably including a Raspberry Pi). You can [could?] also write programs that would run under 'Windows Core IoT' (8 only) but these are not your normal 'Windows programs'. For a start Galileo does not have a built in graphics display capability:
"""Some major differences: RPi has a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU.) Galileo does not. ..."""
> And, as I work for a distributor that sells Intel products, I can tell you that the Galileo is one of our best selling single-board computers.
Being 'one of' and 'our' are qualifications that make the 'best selling' claim meaningless.
To 'So what would putting "Windows" on these devices give me?' take your pick :
1) a headache
2) fan mail from Bill Gates
3) a horrible command line interface with screwed up use of slashes
4) less power than running some flavour of linux
5) closed source tools
6) praying to the deities in Redmond to fix bugs
I could go on ;)
Should have never expected any. Nor wanted any.
Intel is desperate to be in this game and it's a Linux game. So what do the business wizards do? Make the engineers shove Windows on. This is why we are falling in love with ARM, and now MIPS again.
Plan A: Arduino compatibility. Galileo could run Arduino software via in emulation. There result was hundreds of times slower than a cheaper, lower power Arduino board. There is simply no point in a big expensive CPU for applications that already work fine on an Arduino.
Plan B: Raspberry Pi competitor. Although Galileo's CPU is half the clock rate of a Pi, it does more instructions per clock, and works out about the same speed as a Pi B1 CPU. At twice the price, and quadruple to power, the only advantages Galileo had were one lane of PCIe and the ethernet port did not take bandwidth from the USB port. There are other ARMs in Galileo's price bracket with those features, and a Pi B2 has four faster CPU cores and the same GPU as a B1.
To enter the IoT market, Intel has to release a product at near cost that reduces sales of their higher margin products. So far, Intel has decided that a proper IoT product does them more harm than good.
Microsoft knows this move is a kick in the teeth for both of the developers using Windows on Galileo, but anybody using Windows for anything must know by now that one day it will be their turn. It could not have been a surprise.
I's still failing understand why anyone would want to run an full-fat OS on an embedded sensor/controller device. Even a "concentrator" would do fine with a lightweight RTOS.
The point of an OS is sharing resources between functions; when the device is single-function there is no reason to have something to manage the hardware resources. And no need for complicated layered communication protocols when the device has a single function.
Having worked on bare-metal embedded products (including ethernet-connected) AND traditional Windows and Unix software, it's clear that each platfrorm has its place. However hardware size and cost dominate all considerations (including development costs) in commodity embedded systems and any processor that costs more than $2 (in volume) probably won't get a look-in.
I was going to end there, but there are 2 other dimensions to embedded computing that make Windows a non-starter.
First, support life - Microsoft just loves to hype up new tools, only to obsolete them a couple of years later. A device manufacturer wants to know that once the expensive development has been done, the product can be manufactured & sold for as many years as it remains competitive in the market.
Second, non-portability. Since the RPi design can be licensed it is feasible for device manufacturers to build the relevant bits of it into their designs; but the device manufacturer loses the negotiating power of being able to say "mr chip vendor, give us a better price or we build these million boards using someone else's processor". Every penny saved on components goes straight to the manufacturer's bottom line, and some firms have "value engineering" teams whose sole aim in life is to remove components from successful designs, or substitute cheaper alternatives.
>no need for complicated layered communication protocols when the device has a single function
Except when the device has to communicate its data elsewhere. Or talk to the smartphone app that controls it. Etc,
Windows IoT (and, indeed the Pi) is pitched at a level of functionality above your bog standard microcontroller where some level of intelligence is needed in processing sensor data, where relatively complex networking could be involved or where there may be a requirement for some level of security. Or just where having a file system, networking and a standard application environment makes development easier.
Whether there is such a market remains to be seen, but I'm sure there's no intention to get into MSP430 territory,
For everyone referring to Win10 IoT as a "full fat OS" and the lack of HDMI on the Galileo, you are referred to El Reg's earlier article, just as a start:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/21/first_look_windows_10_iot_core_on_raspberry_pi_2/
E.g.
> This means that there is no Windows desktop, nor even a command prompt. That said, it does support PowerShell remoting, which gets you a remote PowerShell terminal from which you can run familiar Windows commands.
How dare you bring facts to a Microsoft bashing session! shame on you!
This is not a place for facts, it is a place for wild speculation built on the inaccuracies and assumptions of the previous posters.
Agree with one previous poster though - there is a huge feel of "me to" to running Win10 on Pi. I really like Win10 on a desktop or laptop, but the Pi ecosystem is so totally dominated by mature Linux offerings and apps. I cant think of any compelling reason to jump ship
> The W10 image for RPi's is 67MB. That's fairly stripped down from the 10's of GB's that a clean install takes up on PC.
There are Linux distros that will boot and run off a floppy disk (1.44Mb)*. They require 16Mb or so of RAM because they use much of this as a RAM disk, but the system includes firewall, gateway, web server, DNS, and much else. 67Mb and requiring 1Gb RAM is not 'cut-down' except in the sense that it doesn't do much - it can only run a single app.
*eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FREESCO
The W10 image for RPi's is 67MB. That's fairly stripped down from the 10's of GB's that a clean install takes up on PC.
That's still bigger than OpenWRT by a big margin. Yes, sounds funny comparing to a router distribution, but that's a platform that can do a lot in a very small amount of space. Another that comes to mind is Yocto project Linux.
Using Windows would mean needing a 128MB (2Gbit) flash device to store OS + application, versus a 16MB one for Linux.
> Using Windows would mean needing a 128MB (2Gbit) flash device to store OS + application, versus a 16MB one for Linux.
The 67Mb is presumably the download size. This is compressed. W10IoT on RPi2 requires a class 10 8GByte SD card. It is reported to fail on slower cards* and won't fit on a 4GB card.
* presumably there is some sort of timeout problem.
No, 67MB is the size of the partition it creates on the 8GB card. Apparently it requires the other space (you have to manually expand the partition) to allow you space to store your apps. I've found the 67MB partition is actually big enough for the OS and a couple of simple apps, I've not looked at how much space is actually occupied by the OS files.
My point that it is only 67MB is not to challenge Linux for the crown of smallest usable OS, but to counter Mark's position that you wouldn't be able to shrink W10 down very much.
"Can Win10 be stripped as far. Or at all?"
simple answer there - the answer is NO.
The Windows IoT thing doesn't even have a display. The only reason to run on a PI 2 is because it has enough CPU and memory to hold the garbage.
And Linux can be stripped down to a VERY small size - even excluding the MMU support. The last time I looked there was the microClinux capability in there as an option.
> The Windows IoT thing doesn't even have a display.
That's strange, I've got mine hooked up to a screen and its quite happily rendering to it.
I wish people would criticise MS for the stuff they do (there's enough of it) rather than making things up. Like the guy down the page who says you need a windows PC to drive the Pi when you use W10 IoT - you don't. You only need one for the initial imaging. After that they run stand alone.
>> The Windows IoT thing doesn't even have a display.
> That's strange, I've got mine hooked up to a screen and its quite happily rendering to it.
Windows 10 IoT does not "have a display". UWP _apps_ running on W10IoT may "have a display".
That is: there is no OS GUI.
> I wish people would criticise MS for the stuff they do (there's enough of it) rather than making things up. Like the guy down the page who says you need a windows PC to drive the Pi when you use W10 IoT - you don't. You only need one for the initial imaging. After that they run stand alone.
A full Windows 10 PC is stated as a requirement. This is required _each_time_ you image the RPi2 SD card and each time that you need to change the app.
As a comparison a RPi2 with, say, Raspian can be used to develop the app as well as run it, no 'PC' required at all, and can even be used to develop Arduino apps and load then to the Arduino.
> Windows 10 IoT does not "have a display". UWP _apps_ running on W10IoT may "have a display".
That is: there is no OS GUI.
If you boot up a clean OS install with a monitor attached it will output video. No, it doesn't include a shell application, but there's nothing stopping anyone from writing one.
> A full Windows 10 PC is stated as a requirement. This is required _each_time_ you image the RPi2 SD card and each time that you need to change the app.
Please, go and give it a try. It's obvious that only one of me and you has actually used the thing. You can copy the SD cards without needing a windows PC, and you can install / uninstall / change boot app via a web browser running on any other computer.
And also get a sense of reality. Microsoft has never suggested that W10IoT will be a drop in desktop OS. It's designed for different purposes - is that really that hard to understand? You're currently doing the equivalent of complaining that a screwdriver is rubbish because you can't use it to slice bread.
> You can copy the SD cards without needing a windows PC,
Not just with W10IoT on a RPi2.
> and you can install / uninstall / change boot app via a web browser running on any other computer.
By "change the app" I was indicating an edit/compile cycle. But even changing the boot sequence to run a different app requires another computer.
> Microsoft has never suggested that W10IoT will be a drop in desktop OS.
When Microsoft announced Win10 for RPi the news boards were full of:
"""Microsoft says it’s "delivering a version of Windows 10 that supports Raspberry Pi 2. ... With the pricing of the Raspberry Pi 2 and Microsoft’s free copy of Windows 10, you could have a full PC for just $35 later this year. We’ll have to wait to hear more information from Microsoft on how Windows 10 will function on the Raspberry Pi 2, but the company says it’s planning to reveal more "in the coming months." It's likely that this version of Windows 10 will only run modern universal apps, as the Raspberry Pi 2 includes an ARM-based processor."""
Now, I knew what MS had done with the Galileo board and that RPi would be much the same, but MS did not make this clear, nor did they with RT. Many believed they would be running Photoshop on their RPi.
> If you boot up a clean OS install with a monitor attached it will output video.
Yes it will. That is because the boot is preset with an app that will display the IP address of the device so that the required Windows 10 PC can be connected to it.
It is not the Win10 OS that is doing the display, it is the UWP app.
> Except when the device has to communicate its data elsewhere. Or talk to the smartphone app that controls it. Etc,
Those don't need complex layered protocols. If the functionality is simple, the protocol can be simple. e.g. a sensor application will be returning the same data over and over - so it can be as simple as encapsulating the binary data in a UDP packet & handing that over to the network hardware. (I won't go into security question here, the trade-offs involved would make for an essay but suffice it to say that cheap microcontrollers like the XMEGAs have AES encryption support in hardware...).
Bluetooth is handy for smartphone comms - and is increasingly integrated in microcontroller hardware and supporting bare-metal software stacks. e.g. Cypress PSoC BLE (which would be my favourite platform for hobbyist projects). So, don't need an OS for that.
lwIP is a free TCP/IP stack that can integrated with an RTOS (e.g. FreeRTOS) or be used bare-metal. Doesn't force a requirement for an OS. There are also wi-fi modules available that allow one to offload the wi-fi and TCP stacks.
> Windows IoT (and, indeed the Pi) is pitched at a level of functionality above your bog standard microcontroller where some level of intelligence is needed in processing sensor data, where relatively complex networking could be involved or where there may be a requirement for some level of security.
W10IoT on the RPi2 may find some usage as a dedicated single-use device, such as a Point of Sale terminal, or a Kiosk. With a screen and keyboard, switch it on and it comes up into the UWP app - and can't do anything else. The downside for MS and OEMs is that this would replace a PC with full Windows. W10IoT is designed to communicate via Azure, so perhaps the main point of this is to change the revenue stream from OS sales to cloud.
"W10IoT on the RPi2 may find some usage as a dedicated single-use device, such as a Point of Sale terminal, or a Kiosk. With a screen and keyboard, switch it on and it comes up into the UWP app - and can't do anything else. The downside for MS and OEMs is that this would replace a PC with full Windows."
IIRC someone claimed this as the reason for the death of WinCE.
Your second point about Azure and cloudy revenue could well be the thinking MS is going through now though.
It seems to me both Intel and Microsoft are now firmly in the 'Me Too' bracket and have no real understanding of what the kit does that they are trying to muscle in on. Neither company appears to have any appreciation of the terms 'lightweight', 'simplicity' or 'efficient'.
" Chipzilla's Raspberry Pi-like Galileo" - Except it's not.
I think people (and Microsoft) are missing the point of the Intel Galileo. It's Intel's take on the Arduno Platform - which is nothing like the Raspberry Pi.
I always assumed MS releasing a version of Windows 10 to run on the Galilieo was an attempt to jump on the "maker" bandwagon. I know the Pi is used within the maker community, but that doesn't mean the Arduno/Galileo platforms are "Rasberry Pi like" and are suitable for an OS designed to have a HDMI port or similar.
And yet, the wierd thing is that the SoC that Galileo is based on is actually a 32-bit X86 device (looks like a shrunken Pentium). If it wasn't for the lack of video output, you could run Windows 95 on it nicely :-)
I wonder if you could use DOS and Trumpet Winsock?
Surely the interesting thing is that best buddies Microsoft and Intel haven't done a deal where they agree that each should pretend the other's technology is relevant - surely someone senior in Intel would phone up someone in Microsoft and say 'oh, go on, carry on supporting this' or someone in Microsoft would do some deal with Intel? Or do both (correctly) think the other is so irrelevant in this field they can't be bothered to go through the niceties?
The Pi was launched with the intention of educating school children about computers, following the terrible state that the education curriculum had got into. Initially it needed the "geeks" to get it working with usable software, and as things have progressed the Raspberry Pi Foundation has pushed a number of tools / facilities / methods that make using the Pi really easy for those that are not IT experts. The launch of the Pi 2B brought a serious increase in power that means the Pi can be used for a lot of the day to day tasks that general users want (email, internet, office). A number of operating systems provide a range of programming languages that are easy to use and learn.
A look at the forum shows that the Pi is being used for a lot of things that the Pi was not intended for, but it has the capabilities to do. It is no wonder that it has been tagged as a IoT device by Microsoft; probably because it is the most suitable device around for the price. A look at the instructions for using it for W10IoT shows that you need a PC or Laptop running full Windows 10 to "drive" it. It is like using a kitchen stool as a step ladder to reach the top cupboard; it can do the job and is probably the most convenient thing to use, but it is not a step ladder.
In fact a Pi in general makes a rubbish IoT device. It is like dedicating a gaming PC for use as a wireless access point - you can do it but why would you want to?
Raspberry Pi's are extremely expensive compared to what is usually needed, plus they require a proper power supply - just try running one on a coin cell or a AAA for a few months! There are plenty of low power single chip microcontrollers with a few 100k flash and 10s k RAM, plus a BLE stack and radio hardware all built in, e.g. QN9000 series, nRF51822, from which you can build an entirely adequate system for this type of application for vastly less than the cost of a Raspberry Pi.
> A look at the instructions for using it for W10IoT shows that you need a PC or Laptop running full Windows 10 to "drive" it. It is like using a kitchen stool as a step ladder to reach the top cupboard; it can do the job and is probably the most convenient thing to use, but it is not a step ladder.
Not only that, but you need a fork lift to put the kitchen stool into place.
Windows 10 IoT is using a RPi2 to emulate an Arduino - an Arduino nano can be bought for $2-$3 - but it still requires an Arduino, or similar, to get analogue input.
Galileo or Raspberry Pi? I know there's millions of Raspberry Pis in use and that they are capable of all the tasks we associate with a computer, data processing and storage, video, networking and ports for peripherals so why would MS choose Intel instead? Control, channel stability? No, just corporate conservatism. Timidity. CYA. All the signs of an organization showing signs of 'maturity'. They're experiencing the business equivalent of 'old age'.
In the last hours Intel has appointed Qualcomm alum and their former nemesis, Venkata Renduchintala as president of their client, IoT and Systems Architecture Group. So IoT is getting a boss who has heard of Linux. And client too.
Hope is not dead. Intel may once again become a go-to provider of chips for people who want to be in control of what their stuff does.
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