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 ?

[Ole Morten]

Just for the fun of it, I just pushed my own bootloader projects to GitHub. Please note that this is my private hobby project, and not at all endorsed by Nordic as a company. I've done it in my spare time, just to see how to do interrupt forwarding and flash writing. It uses a different concept entirely from the official bootloader, which is probably the cause of it being quite slow. It also uses interrupt forwarding, and is hence not dependent on the softdevice, but instead introduces some additional interrupt latency (< 10 instructions).

I don't really have any plans on following this up any further, but I thought I could push it out there so that you can have a look if anyone wants to do something right now and need somthing to look at. Feel free to fork the repository, submit pull requests or just pull the code apart. :) But before doing anything long-term with it, I'd recommend you all to discuss the concept of a bootloader with your Nordic sales representative to ask about our (official) future plans.

I'll also be gone for vacation for the next 3 weeks, and will most likely not be able to participate much here. Since they are hobby projects, noone else knows these applications, so don't expect any help through official channels. :)

[Tielman]

Great stuff, thanks Ole!