Flashing Intel Edison using only serial connection and wifi

edison_flashing_wifi.md

Do this at your own risk. I take no responsibility for any damage caused to your board.

My Intel Edison was shipped to me with old and buggy version of the Yocto Linux image. I purchased only the console block via Sparkfun (which has only one USB port connected to UART2 (serial connection) of the Edison therefore it's not connected to the actual USB on Edison) so I could not update to a new build the normal way.

I assume you have successfully connected to the Edison via the serial connection and can use the linux console on Edison.

1. Connect the Edison into a local WiFi network with configure_edison --wifi
2. Check that you can access to the Edison via SSH or with browser
   • if you can't, vi /etc/systemd/system/basic.target.wants/network-gadget-init.service and change the ip addresses to i.e 192.168.99.15
3. On Edison, cd /
4. mkdir update
5. mkfs.vfat -F32 -I /dev/mmcblk0p9 (mmcblk0p9 is the partition which will contain the new FW files, command formats it to FAT32)
6. mount -t vfat /dev/mmcblk0p9 /update/ (mount the partition to the /update)
7. Connect to the Edison i.e. with FileZilla and move the update .zip file (can be found from Intel www site) to the /update folder on Edison
8. cd /update
9. mkdir temp
10. unzip update_file.zip -d temp
11. rm update_file.zip
12. mv temp/ota_update.scr . (ota_update.scr must be first in the folder hence this)
13. mv temp/* .
14. rm -rf temp
15. reboot ota

If everything is fine, Edison should now boot and start the upgrade process automatically. It takes couple of minutes and after that you have more robust version of the Yocto image up and running. I recommend running configure_edison --setup after the update process.

If you want to update to Yocto 2.1
download edison-image-ww25.5-15 on your computer

connect Edison
open a screen session
go to edison-image-ww25.5-15 directory on your computer and run sudo ./flashall.sh (For osx)

run reboot command on Edison
wait for the update to complete. It should take 5 min. If it took less than that, it means something went wrong.
You should be able to see the update progress on the screen terminal. The longest part is this progress bar...

Writing GPT: success!
Saving Environment to MMC...
Writing to redundant MMC(0)... done
Flashing already done...
GADGET DRIVER: usb_dnl_dfu

Is there a way to get this to work with the latest image? During the unzip process it says the edison runs out of space.
I am using the mini breakout board but unfortunately the lower usb port has broken off and I only can connect via serial usb or wifi.

I tried this last year and had the same issue. I'm not sure if it is possible to use this method anymore.

Steps to update Intel Edison on Ubuntu:

1. Download latest image (iot-devkit-prof-dev-image-edison-20160606.zip)
2. Unzip it on your host computer
3. On your host computer run ./flashall.sh. If you get error

dfu-util: Device has DFU interface, but has no DFU functional descriptor
dfu-util: Cannot open DFU device 8087:0a99

then run it with root privileges.
If you get error with dfu-util not found then run sudo apt install dfu-util
4) Plug in your Intel Edison board with both cables.
5) Flash procedure starts.

You don't need to copy image to Intel Edison partition.