Edison Board Class (1st Session)
14 October 2015

Last night I went along to the first session of the Edison board class that is being run by the local FabLab. This class will, hopefully, take me from a novice to a maker on the Edison board in six weeks. The class will end on a huge high as the final session is going to be a day's Hackathon. How awesome is that?

In last night's session two very knowledgeable and friendly volunteers, Ian and Simon, talk the class through the features of an Edison Board. They also showed us how to set-up a PC so that it can work with the Edison board.

The session began with an introduction to the features of the Edison board. The Edison boards features include:

• Dual-core CPU
• WiFi
• Bluetooth 4.0
• 1 GB DDR
• 4 GB FLASH memory
• Runs Yocto Linux

Ian and Simon also give us an idea of what the board and its features can do. An idea such as, controlling outside lights using the whereabouts of a connected GPS device.

Next we learnt about expansion boards. We learnt that there are several expansion boards for the Edison, such as the ones made by Sparkfun. And that you can create your own expansion board, if you plan to attach an Edison board to your own product. During this FabLab class we are using the Arduino Edison Kit (expansion board). Here, in the following video, is an overview of the Arduino Edison Kit we are using.

Once Ian and Simon had bought us up-to-speed on the Edison board and the Arduino kit's features they showed us how to connect them up. Just like in the un-boxing and assembly video from Intel (below).

Finally, we set-up the drivers on our laptops so that next week we can start coding and attaching sensors. Our homework, for the week, is to set-up the Edison Eclipse for C/C++ IDE, set-up the Arduino IDE, and to set-up the Intel XDK IDE.

Sadly, I don't think I am going to get to use Java with the Edison board for the time being. However, I can make do with C/C++ and or JavaScript. I think the idea behind installing the three IDEs is to let us try out the different ways to code for an Edison board.

If you are interested in how the class is going keep an eye out on this blog because, I am planning to add an update post after each of sessions.

While looking for the other two video's I found the 'step-by-step guide to windows' by Carlos Montesionos to be very good. So I thought I would add it to the end of this post.