Flash Edge Impulse Firmware to Arduino

Flash Edge Impulse Firmware to Arduino#

On your Raspberry Pi we will install edge-impulse-cli and arduino-cli.

Before doing anything, let’s update the installed software.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Edge Impulse CLI#

Now do the relevant portions from the Linux installation docs.

Specifically,

  • Install node

  • Verify node version and path

  • Install edge-impulse-cli

After installing you need to exit that terminal and open a new one.

Then verify it installed:

edge-impulse-daemon --version

Arduino CLI#

Install arduino-cli according to the docs

First, ensure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH.

The environment variable $PATH is a list of directories that the OS will search for executables, in order.

# This shows your home directory, which uses the ~ symbol for short
# We expect it to be /home/pi/ by default, but it can be whatever!
echo $HOME

# This will print your current path.
# We expect to see ~/.local/bin/ towards the end,
# but instead of ~ it will be the result from the previous command
echo $PATH

We want to install the Arduino CLI to somewhere on our path. If we do ~/.local/bin we don’t need sudo.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arduino/arduino-cli/master/install.sh | BINDIR=~/.local/bin sh

Verify installation

arduino-cli version

Dialout Group#

Lastly, we need to add your user to the Linux dialout group.

Note

It took Capt Yarbrough two entire afternoons to figure out that this needs to be done 🫠

The dialout group grants users permissions to access serial ports and modems. Our Arduino board and daemon will connect to the serial port in such a way that we’ll need this.

sudo usermod -aG dialout $USER

Then reboot.

sudo reboot

Once logged back in, user pi (or whoever you are) should be in dialout group.

grep dialout /etc/group

Arduino Firmware#

Follow the instructions to connect edge impulse to the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense.

Specifically, you need to connect the board and update firmware. You don’t strictly need to do the “setting keys” part, but it might be helpful.

RESET to launch bootloader

If successful you should see a message like

Flashed your Arduino Nano 33 BLE development board.

Tip

You can do all of this on Raspberry Pi or you can do all of this on Windows. But I’ve found that:

  1. Installing node and these things on Windows is a bad idea.

  2. Folks like to be able to take their board and laptop out of the lab and still do work.

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