Quick start
Power on
Hold the gray button for 3 seconds, then let go — FREE-WILi 2 powers on. Plugging in USB powers it on too.
Power off
Hold the red button for 6 seconds and the device begins a safe 10-second shutdown, then settles into a 60 µA sleep called ship mode.
Holding red at power-up is a different thing entirely — it forces the main processor into its recovery bootloader instead of affecting power at all. See Recovery mode if that's what you're after.
The main menu
Once it's up, you land on the main menu: a scrolling list of panels — the screens the firmware itself draws and hands the buttons and touchscreen to (see Screen and buttons for the full layout and how this differs from a real, SD-card-launched app). Some panels are grouped into folders (IO, Wireless, GUI, System, and others). Use up and down on the D-pad to move through the list, and center (or ok) to open whatever's highlighted — including opening a folder to reveal the panels inside it. Cancel backs out one level.
On-device help
Press Cancel on any panel to read that panel's own help page. On a panel that already uses Cancel for something of its own, hold it for 6 seconds instead.
The buttons
Four buttons beside the screen mean the same thing on every panel:
| Button | What it does | |
|---|---|---|
 | Ok | Opens or confirms whatever is selected |
| Cancel | Backs out one level — or opens that screen's help page, where it has one |
 | Home | Straight back to the main menu, from anywhere |
 | Page | Switches to another screen within the same panel, where there is one |
The five coloured buttons under the screen mean whatever the panel you're looking at says they mean. The bar along the bottom of the screen always shows their current labels, so when in doubt, read the bar.
|  |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gray | Yellow | Green | Blue | Red |
The D-pad moves through whatever is on screen: up and down through a list, left and right to change a selected value, and center to open or activate — the same action as Ok on the main menu.
Screen and buttons has the full map, including the long-press shortcuts.
Something to try right now
No wiring, no setup: open the GUI folder and select Sensors. It reads the onboard IMU, magnetometer, ambient light, and temperature/humidity sensors directly — nothing to connect, nothing to configure.
From there, Screen and buttons covers the rest of the navigation model, and Connecting covers the other two ways to reach the same features — from a host PC, or over a serial terminal — if you'd rather not do everything on the small screen.