Recommended approach for field upgrade of nRF52832 via UART?

[riceman0]

Hello, we are developing a system that will include an nRF52832 in peripheral mode, that will be connected to from a maintenance App (or something) on a mobile phone,and will communicate with our main processor via UART.

What we would like to do is to field upgrade the nRF52832 firmware occasionally.  The new binary will have to come from the main processor, via the UART.

I'm not quite sure how this would work with the SoftDevice and nordic paradigm.  Normally we would write a bootloader that would launch before our firmware, but I think the SoftDevice actually runs first.

Is there some recommended practice or examples on how to field upgrade your firmware on a Nordic device that runs with a SoftDevice?

Thanks for any help!  

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

The nRF5 SDK includes a bootloader that can use several transport layers, including UART. I suggest you refer to the Secure DFU Bootloader over Serial Link (UART/USB) example and the bootloader documentation.

Nordic does not provide a UART DFU master implementation in C for your main processor, but you can refer to the DFU protocol documentation and some of the other implementations, for instance, this unofficial DFU master implementation.

[riceman0]

Thank you!  Perfect answer, we will research those and follow up.