SiLabs Thunderboard Sense 2

The Silicon Labs Thunderboard Sense 2 is a complete development board with a Cortex-M4 microcontroller, a wide variety of sensors, a microphone, Bluetooth Low Energy and a battery holder - and it's fully supported by Edge Impulse. You'll be able to sample raw data, build models, and deploy trained machine learning models directly from the studio - and even stream your machine learning results over BLE to a phone. It's available for around 20 USD directly from Silicon Labs.

The Edge Impulse firmware for this development board is open source and hosted on on GitHub: edgeimpulse/firmware-silabs-thunderboard-sense-2.

Silicon Labs Thunderboard Sense 2

Installing dependencies

To set this device up in Edge Impulse, you will need to install the following software:

1. Edge Impulse CLI.

2. On Linux:

   • GNU Screen: install for example via sudo apt install screen.

Problems installing the CLI?

See the Installation and troubleshooting guide.

Connecting to Edge Impulse

With all the software in place it's time to connect the development board to Edge Impulse.

1. Connect the development board to your computer

Use a micro-USB cable to connect the development board to your computer. The development board should mount as a USB mass-storage device (like a USB flash drive), with the name TB004. Make sure you can see this drive.

2. Update the firmware

The development board does not come with the right firmware yet. To update the firmware:

1. Download the latest Edge Impulse firmware.

2. Drag the silabs-thunderboard-sense2.bin file to the TB004 drive.

3. Wait 30 seconds.

3. Setting keys

From a command prompt or terminal, run:

edge-impulse-daemon

This will start a wizard which will ask you to log in and choose an Edge Impulse project. If you want to switch projects run the command with --clean.

Alternatively, recent versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge can collect data directly from your development board, without the need for the Edge Impulse CLI. See this blog post for more information.

4. Verifying that the device is connected

That's all! Your device is now connected to Edge Impulse. To verify this, go to your Edge Impulse project, and click Devices. The device will be listed here.

Device connected to Edge Impulse.

Next steps: building a machine learning model

With everything set up you can now build your first machine learning model with these tutorials:

• Building a continuous motion recognition system.

• Recognizing sounds from audio.

• Responding to your voice.

Looking to connect different sensors? The Data forwarder lets you easily send data from any sensor into Edge Impulse.

Did you know? You can also stream the results of your impulse over BLE to a nearby phone or gateway: see Streaming results over BLE to your phone.

Troubleshooting

Dragging and dropping Edge Impulse .bin file results in FAIL.TXT

When dragging and dropping an Edge Impulse pre-built .bin firmware file, the binary seems to flash, but when the device reconnects a FAIL.TXT file appears with the contents "Error while connecting to CPU" and the following errors appear from the Edge Impulse CLI impulse runner:

$ edge-impulse-run-impulse
Edge Impulse impulse runner v1.12.5
[SER] Connecting to /dev/tty.usbmodem0004401612721
[SER] Serial is connected, trying to read config...
[SER] Failed to get info off device:undefined. Is this device running a binary built through Edge Impulse? Reconnecting in 5 seconds...
[SER] Serial is connected, trying to read config...

To fix this error, install the Simplicity Studio 5 IDE and flash the binary through the IDE's built in "Upload application..." menu under "Debug Adapters", and select your Edge Impulse firmware to flash:

Simplicity Studio 5 IDE Debug Adapters window

Your Edge Impulse inferencing application should then run successfully with edge-impulse-run-impulse.