Intel Edison – #1 Getting Started – Updating Firmware

Introduction

After waiting for a couple weeks, I received my Sparkfun Edison Starter Pack, and my Sensor Pack!

Now that I have it, I’m really excited to start making things with it! As I have found a lack of tutorials and guides for the Edison (Intel has some hardware guides and stuff, but not as much as I would expect), I decided to bring you along with me on my journey of diving into the world of embedded electronics and the Intel Edison. For these tutorials I will be using the SparkFun Base Block, which has the FTDI and OTG connectors on it that you need to connect to the computer, for connecting with the board, and I will be using the other blocks in the Starter Pack and the Sensor Pack for the rest of the tutorials. Also later on, I will use SSH and the Eclipse for Edison IDE to program and remotely upload files and test programs on the Edison.

I will also be assuming that you’re using Windows. Usually I would show how to do this on all operating systems, but it would be too much work for me to do it on my Macbook Pro and my Ubuntu Virtualbox, as well as on my main Windows computer. The steps are pretty similar for Linux and Mac though, so I’ll leave some notes where there are differences.

When trying to get started with it, I spent a couple hours just attempting to download the firmware, I found that Sparkfun and Intel’s guides are a bit out of date, so that is going to be my first tutorial.

Getting Started

Drivers

First you’ll want to download and install the FTDI drivers for the Edison from here, and then if you’re on a Windows computer, you’ll need to download and install the Intel Windows Standalone Driver here, and after installing those you’ll need to restart your computer.

Connecting The Edison

To connect to the Edison and update the firmware, you’ll need to plug both USB ports on the base block into the computer. The SparkFun Starter Pack comes with a USB cord, but it seems that whoever designed the USB cord forgot that you need 2 cords to update the firmware on the Edison. The cord that comes with the Starter Pack works well if you’re only using one port, but if you want to use both ports (which you need for the firmware update), you’ll find that the cord is too large to allow you to comfortably plug a second cord in next to it,. You’ll have to go and buy or find 2 USB cords with a small heads that fit in the Base Block next to each other.

On my Edison I used 2 Amazon Kindle charging cords I borrowed from my family to connect the Edison, because their small, compact, heads fit in perfectly next to each other.

Once you have 2 USB cords that fit in next to each other on the Base Block, you can move onto the next step.

Updating The Firmware

First download the latest “Yocto Complete Image” from the Intel Edison download page found here.

I was following SparkFun’s guide to manually updating the firmware (I found that the Intel installer package failed to update the firmware) when I ran into an unexplainable issue, when attempting to copy the update files to the Edison drive that showed up on my computer, I found that there wasn’t enough space on the drive to hold the update files!

After trying to figure out what was happening for half an hour, I noticed a file called “flashall.bat” in the folder with the update files, so I attempted running that, and found that that’s the way you update the firmware now! It will guide you through how to update the firmware on your Edison.

One thing that you’ll need to know, is how to restart it when it asks you to shutdown your Edison, and power it back on:

• Hold down the power button on the base block for about 10 seconds
• Wait a couple seconds, and then press the power button for about 1 second

After you’ve done all that, you should be good to go! Now the firmware on your Edison is updated, which fixes some annoying bugs that are present in the version that comes on your board.