Thought this might be of interest to fellow makers. Microsoft is giving away free Intel Galileo Dev boards as part of their Windows Developer Program for Internet of Things. Basically you just sign up at: http://www.windowsondevices.com/ Once signed up they will email you with a link to enter you address. From the follow up email: "We would like to share our SDK and a hardware development kit with you. In order to mail you the kit, please click on the link below to provide your address and a bit more information." The boards can accept various arduino shields and can run Linux and Windows on the 32bit x86 based cpu. Hope some of you find this useful. Happy Making
Thanks for sharing the info / link Boundo. I would be most interested in hearing of the outcome - perhaps I have become sceptical but you know what they say "If something looks too good to be true... ". Tweakie.
I saw this a few days ago but I never got the email. Just tried again with a different email and it worked. Thanks
Well, I signed up and completed the additional link they send you. Just got an email saying they'll let me know when my Dev Kit ships.
Hi Guys, Don't get too excited, this has been discussed a lot on other forums and probably the most authoritative quote is as follows:- This "deal" has actually been around since January. The "We’ll let you know when your kit has shipped" e-mail does not necessarily mean you will get hardware. Microsoft is sending out two kits - one containing the board and another (received by most) containing the literature-only Galileo Software Development Kit. If you are using an address linked to an MSDN account, are responding to a printed offer distributed at one of several electronics shows, or have a pre-existing commercial relationship with Microsoft, you are much more likely to get hardware. If you have no prior business relationship with Microsoft (owning Windows doesn't count), you are more likely to get the literature kit unless your project idea is subjectively determined to be of interest. Microsoft is well aware of deal sites creating a flood of requests for these kinds of offers (with most of the hardware ending up on eBay a few weeks later). So they are now much more discriminating about who actually gets what. Here is what most people got back in March during the last flood of requests: "In a few weeks you will get a First Class or UPS mailer with a two pocket paper folder inside containing a DVD with a non-commercial use preview of the MS devices SDK and some VB, and C++ example code. In addition to the DVD there is a Intel Galileo datasheet that includes a link to download three whitepapers describing some basic hardware development projects and implementation on the Intel Galileo and Quark platforms The whitepaper set is even titled Hardware development kit on the Galileo platform. So bottom line It is nothing more than a set of whitepapers describing how to implement their SDK on Intel Galileo and Quark, nothing else." Tweakie.
