#Intel #EdisonBoard
Intel Edison boards are now discontinued. The successor, the Joule board, was also discontinued. As both products were made for the Internet of things (IoT), there are many opinions that Intel is withdrawing from this market. Anyway, Intel has extremely miniaturized the Edison board to meet IoT and wearables. Although it is a board that is no longer supported, it is smaller than the Raspberry Pi (RPi), but I tried it because I was attracted to the performance that was not lacking. The Edison board setting method is detailed on Intel’s website. This article contains information about the problems encountered during setting, especially flashing.
Breakout board ¶
Since Edison board is small, development can proceed only when it is combined with ‘Breakout board’. With the help of bonding, the Edison board can be controlled via the two USB ports. While the Intel logo engraved on the Edison board is immediately visible, the bottom USB port is responsible for supplying 5V power and mounting the flash storage. The upper USB port is in charge of serial communication with the Edison board.
Setup tool(NO MORE SUPPORT) ¶
As with most development boards, the kernel and the root file system (rootfs) must be mounted on the board first. This is called flashing. The ‘Setup tool’, a GUI tool for flashing, is provided along with the kernel image through the Intel website. However, the Setup tool does not support the latest OSX and Windows 10. In OSX, flashing is possible, but the superblock is broken and not fully flashed. Therefore, flashing had to be performed through serial communication in the classical way. It does not deviate much from the flashing method of existing boards.
Make edison ready to flashing ¶
First of all, in order to communicate with Edison board serially, you need to connect the upper USB. After that, follow the procedure below. On OSX, type the following in the terminal: However, as a result, flashing in OSX failed and flashing was performed in Windows.
ls /dev/cu.usbserial-*
screen /dev/cu.usbserial-XXXXXXXX 115200 -L
In Windows, you can use Putty, a tool for remote terminal access. You can check the port number required for connection in Device Manager, and set the baud rate to 115200.
After serial communication is connected, reboot the Edison board and press any key during booting to get the shell of u-boot, a small boot loader. In this shell, type run do_flash. Immediately afterward, the Edison board waits for flashing from the host.
Flashing ¶
If you unpack the previously downloaded kernel image, you can see some executable scripts along with the image. These are flashall.sh and flashall.bat. The former is a flashing script for OSX or Linux, the latter for Windows. On OSX, this script did not run well, whereas on Windows it worked. However, in the case of Windows, dfu-util.exe and libusb-1.0.dll must be inserted in the same location as the kernel image. Both files can be downloaded through the article below, which introduces the flashing method through serial communication in detail.
Flashing the OS Image on your Board with Windows
After that, if you run flashall.bat in the Windows shell, flashing is performed. It takes considerable time. The figure below is the final screen shot after flashing.