Starting with Intel® Edison Platform

[ intel hardware embedded linux tutorial edison ]

The Edison Platform is a little computer with all necessary system and hardware to provide a good experiment, we have: wi-fi, bluetooth, serial, io pins and alot more.

As we see the Edson board is an x86-32 architecture, 4 gigabytes to store our files, 1 gigabyte of ram to execute our applications, 2 processing cores to allow the development of parallel programs. this is a development platform with higher performance compared to Respaberry Pi  and 1/40 of its volume.

Starting

You will need two  USBs (micro B), one is for serial communication and the other is for power, ethernet, arduino upload and storage device.

Connecting the two cables in your computer, you can use Putty if you are using windows, or you can use screenin your linux computer.

$ screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

After connect, type two times the enter key and now we can access the terminal from the Yocto Linux. The login can be root/root or edison/edison.

Configuration

Now, we can configure Edison with the command $ configure_edison --setup , we can configure almost everything including the Wi-Fi. The board have already an ssh-server enabled by default.

$ configure_edison --setup

Installing programs

The Yocto don't have a package manager with the usual programs, so we need to download the *.deb file of the x86-32 architecture.

An example, to install nemo (the text editor):

$ wget http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.2/nano-2.2.0.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf nano-2.2.0.tar.gz
$ cd  nano*
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Installing programs with opkg

The Intel have a repository from the Yocto projecto to the Edison, we can upgrade or system repository to use the Intel IoT devkit.

nano /etc/opkg/base-feeds.conf

Inside this file, we need to write the local of the Intel repositories.

src all http://iotdk.intel.com/repos/1.1/iotdk/all
src x86 http://iotdk.intel.com/repos/1.1/iotdk/x86
src i586    http://iotdk.intel.com/repos/1.1/iotdk/i586

After that, we can upgrade or package manager database.

opkg update

And install something util.

opkg install git