Over the air bootloader

RE: Over the air bootloader

Ole Morten — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 09:55:22 GMT

To clean things up, I'd be happy if you could evaluate the answers you have received and accept one of them if you feel it's sufficient. If not, it might be useful to expand your question a little and provide further information.

RE: Over the air bootloader

Tielman — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 05:18:56 GMT

Great stuff, thanks Ole!

RE: Over the air bootloader

Ole Morten — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 20:16:56 GMT

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. :)

RE: Over the air bootloader

Bikkel — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 09:29:23 GMT

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.

RE: Over the air bootloader

Marc Nicholas — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 23:16:52 GMT

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

RE: Over the air bootloader

Ole Morten — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 14:55:34 GMT

As I said above, upgrading the application is most definitely technically possible, and it shouldn't be very hard to make yourself if you are familiar with the ARM Cortex M0 and BLE. The only bootloader solution we currently have is the UART bootloader contained in SDKs 4.2.0 and 4.3.0.

I cannot say anything about what we will and will not make here, but your sales representatives might have further information to share.

RE: Over the air bootloader

Ole Morten — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 14:52:36 GMT

All our sales people should be familiar with the concept of a bootloader. Please see my private message, Bikkel.

RE: Over the air bootloader

cocoa — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 13:37:54 GMT

It's absolutly actractive. Fundamental and disruptive.

RE: Over the air bootloader

Bikkel — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 13:29:59 GMT

My Sales representative, did not understand what the word bootloader means that's why this question ended on this forum. If it is technical possible I could develop it myself, unfortunatully I'm not as smart as the people in Trontheim.

RE: Over the air bootloader

Ole Morten — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 13:21:03 GMT

It is most definitely technically possible to do a BLE bootloader for over-the-air firmware upgrading, but currently the only option we have is the experimental UART bootloader included in SDKs 4.3.0.

If you need to know for sure about future developments, you should contact your sales representative.

RE: Over the air bootloader

Bikkel — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 13:16:32 GMT

Yes it is very attractive. With over the air bootloading you do not need any cable connectors saving on hardware and make the device more simple. No extra hole in the hardware for a connector like USB etc. This make upgrading in the field so much more user friendly. Also is it a bit weird I think, you plant a BLE chip on the PCB with the purpose to go wireless. No when you want to upgrade you need a cable again. Can it be done in the NRF51822 from a technical point of view ?

RE: Over the air bootloader

andy2003hunan — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 12:57:25 GMT

is this function atrractive? in my oppinion,the specs are more important.