Introduction: Troubleshooting the MediaTek LinkIt ONE Board

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About: I am a queer, transgender, nonbinary, and mixed-race picture book writer/illustrator. As a young person, I didn’t have the words to explain the big feelings I had about my identity and relationships. It is so …

I was super stoked to get my LinkIt One Board in the mail and followed the provided directions to set up. But, when I tried to update the board's firmware, I ran into a wall that took a bit of investigation to get past. I ended up borrowing a friend's computer running Windows 7 to be able to update the firmware because the LinkIt is not compatible with Mac OS X El Capitan‎. Thankfully, now that I've updated the firmware I am able to develop for the board on my mac!

The LinkIt is a super powerful board, but there are some issues with it working right out of the box. It takes patience, but it is worth it to stick with it.

Step 1: Updating Firmware

MediaTek has a pretty helpful guide for setting up your board that goes over downloading the Arduino IDE and LinkIT SDK. After somesearches, I found I was not alone in having issues with the Link it and El Capitan. Once I tried using an older Windows 7 computer though, firmware upgrade was flawless following MediaTek's instructions.

Step 2: Sensors & Example Code Not Compiling

I thought that a good way to try out the LinkIt was to try using some sensors and Arduino examples with it. The first sensors I tried were some temperature sensors (shown above). The DHT11 is a relatively inexpensive temperature and humidity sensor. The other is a temperature probe that works with the OneWire library. Unfortunately, when I downloaded the libraries for Arduino and ran the sample code, they did not compile for the MediaTek LinkIt ONE Board, even though they do compile for the Arduino Uno! Part of the issue is that some libraries have the board type hardcoded in the library which causes some compatibility problems with the LinkIt. I even tried downloading a OneWire library specifically for the LinkIt that did not compile. I did have some luck with the DHT11 by following this Instructable--however I found there was an issue with the sensor itself because the temperature did not reflect the actual temperature of the room.