Over the air bootloader

[Bikkel]

Dear support,

We are in the design stage for a BLE application. We looked at different options. Although the NRF51822 seems better in specs. The TI parts CCxx offer this bootloading over the air option which is very attractive to us as we can skip some hardware parts like USB connector etc. Are there developers busy with a Nordic solution which uses over the air bootloading ? Is this technical possible ?

[Marc Nicholas]

Whilst it is very attractive, I would say that you absolutely, categorically want Nordic to take their time making sure that it works flawlessly. A bricked boot loader in the field on a consumer product would be a disaster, for example.

My experience with Nordic so far is that they're fairly conservative in introducing new features, which is a Good Thing(tm) in the long run. :)

Whilst OTA updates sound like a great feature, and they are, you should be aware of some of the [current] fundamental limitations of BLE. Namely, if you think you're going to be achieving anything near ~250kbps in throughput whilst updating the firmware, you're sadly mistaken. Real world performance will be a couple of kilobytes a second -- on the verge of what is tolerable to the average consumer.

There's working groups within the Bluetooth SIG whose proposals/work will alleviate this in time, though.

-m

[Bikkel]

Good point Marc this transfer speed. That is why it is important to pack such a feature in the BLE stack itself. Ideally you want as much fixed (proven) code in the BLE stack and keep the user application small. The first price would be if the uploading is handled by the BLE stack itself. Even if you mess up the user code you can still upload new code. I don't know if that is possible.