Arduino + x86 power

The Intel Galileo is an interesting mashup. It’s Arduino compatible. You can hand it to an undergrad and they can download the Arduino IDE and program it on their own with relatively little training. However, it’s also a 32-bit x86 SoC, so it’s running that Arduino sketch in one thread while having plenty of processing power to spare for more complex tasks. It runs Linux out of the box, and so there’s a lot of code you can build from. Here’s a nice tutorial to get started.