Introduction: Starting With Intel Edison

By Vitor Leal

First you need to update the Intel Edison firmware.

Go to the Intel website and download it.


Then open the mounted disk and remove everything inside. Unzip the content of the download in the drive then access the Edison using Screen (see next steps).

After that you can run the command:

$ reboot ota

Step 1: ​Connect to Intel Edison Using Screen in the Terminal

After connecting the USB cable to the debug serial port (the mini USB port in the far left) you can find the usbserial address using the command:

 $ cat /dev/tty.usbserial*
/dev/tty.usbserial-A903BX8V

It should output something like /dev/tty.usbserial-A903BX8V.

Now you can use Screen to connect to the Edison board:

$ screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A903BX8V 115200

After the command screen you pass the Edison tty.usberial address that we discovered in the first command, in my case /dev/tty.usbserial-A903BX8V and after that the baud rate 115200.

Now you will be prompted with the login screen.

If it do not prompt from start just hit the return key. 

Poky (Yocto Project Reference Distro) 1.6.1 vitor-edison ttyMFD2
edison login:

The default login is root and there's no password ;)

edison login: root

password:

Step 2: Edison Config

After you are logged in you can start configuring your Intel Edison's name, password, WiFi and other goodies of the board.


To do that just run the command:


$ edison-config --setup

Step 3: Turning on the Bluetooth Module in Your Intel Edison

If you run the command hciconfig command and you can't find the module, just restart your Bluetooth module. Run the command:

$ rfkill unblock bluetooth

Now if you run the command hciconfig you should see something like:

root@edison:~# hciconfig
hci0:   Type: BR/EDR  Bus: UART
        BD Address: 98:4F:EE:03:FF:19  ACL MTU: 1021:8  SCO MTU: 64:1
        UP RUNNING PSCAN 
        RX bytes:661 acl:0 sco:0 events:38 errors:0
        TX bytes:1472 acl:0 sco:0 commands:38 errors:0

Then you can turn the Bluetooth device hci0 up:

$ hciconfig hci0 up

Now you are good to go to find and connect to Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy devices.