Microsoft’s diversification of Windows 10 continues with the introduction of the Windows 10 IoT Core Insider preview, which is essentially the Windows 10 preview for tiny computers. At the moment the preview only supports the Raspberry Pi 2 and Intel Minnowboard, but it intends to expand the range over time.
Windows Insiders can now download the Windows 10 IoT Core preview for the Raspberry Pi 2, although Microsoft says that this is only a conversation starter and there will be many rough edges to the software. The hope is that the community will provide feedback to fix bugs and prioritise development work.
The Raspberry Pi is one of the most popular developer boards in the world, and is used for building just about anything the owner can hack it into. It would make sense that Microsoft is reaching out to this platform as well, and it will be interesting to see how it fits into the bigger shared Windows platform.
Microsoft also announced a partnership with Arduino to bring “Arduino Certified” devices for Windows 10 to bridge the gap between the Windows Universal Platform and Arduino devices. Essentially this provides Arduino based machines access to machines running on Windows 10, which provides wireless access to the hardware. Microsoft provides the example of using the camera and other sensors on a Lumia 530 to create a project that includes GPS, a touch interface, and speech technologies.
In addition to this, there is the Windows Remote Arduino; which allows users to use their Windows devices as a remote extension of the Arduino system. According to the blog post, this will allows a Windows 10 machine to share image processing, speech recognition, website parsing, cameras and advanced audio pipelines with an Arduino project.
Seeing Microsoft provide an operating system and developer options in a space that is traditionally associated with open source projects like Linux is very interesting indeed. The company has ignored developers for far too long, and it will be an uphill battle to gain their trust and support. Still, it is a start for Windows, and will hopefully translate into an eco-system with some really weird and unusual devices.
[Source: Windows Blog]
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