A comparison of Galileo with the most popular boards

Along with Galileo, Raspberry Pi and Arduino Yún are very popular boards among makers. All of them are Linux-embedded and have open source hardware design.

The following is a table with some features of each board:

Here's the brief comparison of the boards:

• Arduino Yún: At first glance, we can say that Yún and Galileo have more in common than with the Raspberry Pi. The number of available PWM, analog and digital pins make them good boards for projects with sensors. Arduino Yún is compatible with most Arduino Leonardo shields. Although Galileo shares a look alike development environment and board setup, not all the shields are compatible because some of the Arduino libraries are heavily bound to the Arduino architecture. Galileo runs a custom Yocto-based Linux in its 8 MB SPI flash by default. To be able to install stronger tools, it requires to be booted from a microSD card image provided by Intel. Yún runs an OpenWrt distribution, and has 16 MB of space available for the entire operating system. It is not possible to boot load from the microSD card, but is possible to increase its disk space by plugging in a microSD card and configuring it to become the new Linux file system. An advantage of Yún is that it already brings Wi-Fi on its board. Galileo requires connecting a Wi-Fi adapter.
• Raspberry Pi: Raspberry Pi, the board with the biggest community, is the only board in our table that has video and audio output, making it more interesting for multimedia projects. However, the lack of analog inputs makes this board less interesting to work with analog sensors.

Galileo is compatible with Arduino in the way that it can run 3.3 and 5 V shields, but it has some restrictions because of the Arduino's AVR libraries dependencies. Before buying a shield, you should check whether it is supported by Galileo.

Some of the advantages of the Galileo board when compared to the mentioned ones are the possibilities of working with PCI Express mini cards and using a real-time clock. Besides these, Galileo comes fully ready to work with sensors; this makes it an interesting tool for data collection.

Like the Raspberry Pi, the possibility of booting from a stronger Linux image makes it possible for projects developed in some of the most popular languages such as Python or Node.js (Javascript).