Our first contact with the Intel Edison was not very encouraging: we received it without any firmware, So we had to flash it from scratch. Here are
the main steps to do that:
Prerequisites
To flash your Edison, including reinstalling the boot loader, you need:
- A Linux image, Intel offers Yocto-Linux, which you can download from their site, but there are others.
- The dfu-util tool, available for both Windows and Linux
- The xfstk tool to install the boot loader. Unfortunately, it seems to be available only for Linux. So you also need a Linux machine. Instead, you can try with a virtual machine or even a Linux on a USB stick. You must find a version of xfstk pre-compiled for your system, or be able to compile it on your own.
Installation
When you have retrieved all the pieces, unzip the Linux image in a directory of your choice, go to this directory, make sure that
dfu-util and
xfstk are available and
- Run the flashall.sh --recovery script to install the boot loader.
- Only then, connect the Edison to your machine through the OTG port. If you want to see what happens, connect the serial console as well.
- When the boot loader is installed, rerun flashall without parameters this time, to install the OS. Note that in our case, it didn't work on Linux, we had to do it on Windows.
At this stage, your Edison is supposed to display a login prompt. On the YoctoLinux image, the username is
root and there is not password. The last thing you must do is to configure your Edison with the
configure_edison --setup command.
