UART ttyMFD1 serial port on Intel Edison

On the Intel Edison Arduino board, the J18 Arduino connector block TX/RX pins have the UART connected to /dev/ttyMFD1 in the default Yocto install.

The Mini-Breakout board Intel Edison has 1.8 V GPIO and can be damaged from connecting directly to 3.3 V or 5 V TTL logic. You need a level shifter board to do the interface to non-1.8V logic from the Mini-Breakout board.

To receive a stream from Intel Edison UART from a serial device that constantly streams output like a GPS NMEA stream.

At the Edison shell prompt:

stty -F /dev/ttyMFD1 9600
cat /dev/ttyMFD1

where 9600 is serial port device baudrate Text streams to console from UART serial device on Edison.

To two-way TX/RX from Intel Edison UART install:

opkg install screen

Connect interactively to UART device from the Edison shell

screen /dev/ttyMFD1 9600

where 9600 is serial port device baudrate

MRAA + PySerial make using the Intel Edison serial port easy from Python.

Install MRAA on the Edison and istall Pyserial:

python -m pip install pyserial

Verify serial port operation with:

import serial
import mraa

uart = mraa.Uart(0)

ser = serial.Serial(uart.getDevicePath(), 9600)

ser.write("TEST")
print ser.read(4)

Notes:

• Pyserial tutorial
• mraa UART from Python

Intel Edison GPIO: Getting Started Guide