News CSIRO picks Intel's Edison for bee-tracking project

Glues tiny RFID tags to their backs.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2015/08/25/csiro-intel-edison/1

 

An Arduino Mega or Due with Wi-Fi connectivity to automatically upload the tracking data to CSIRO so people don't have to go and bother the bees every few hours would have a considerably bigger footprint and draw considerably more power than an Edison based system, while also costing more. (You'd pay £35 for a real Due or £15 for a Chinese knock-off, plus £60 for an official Wi-Fi shield or £30 for a Chinese knock-off; the Edison is £40 and has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity built-in.)

Yes, you could do it cheaper if you had an Arduino logging to an SD card offline. Until you factor in the cost of having someone go and swap out the SD cards in a few thousand hives in order to get the data, in which case it would become considerably more expensive.

I'm not a huge fan of the Edison - I've got one 'ere, with Arduino break-out board, but rarely use it - but for this kind of use-case, it's pretty dang neat. Personally, though, I would have opted for the Spark Core (or Particle Photon, as it's now known) with the option of the soon-to-be-released Electron - which swaps the Wi-Fi of the Photon for 2G or 3G mobile connectivity, allowing it to work anywhere there's a mobile signal - for more remote hives.

This all ignores the biggest factor in all this, of course: Intel is almost certainly financially involved in the project. They either funded CSIRO's research or, at the very least, covered the cost of the Edison hardware, in order to boast of a major design win for what at present is still a niche product in the embedded market.