Hi Will (and company),
Sorry to recycle an old thread, but I was just doing some testing with
the bootloader on the latest release, and wanted to come back to the
issue of having a purely serial option for flashing images in the
bootloader. From my perspective there are a number of valid use cases
around uploading an image on an empty device (other than the bootloader)
over UART or USB CDC, but others may disagree.
This would provide an inexpensive mechanism to debrick boards, for
example, as well as a useful tool for production environments where you
don´t have the financial or practical means to send a half dozen
commercially licensed JLink to your assembly house or somewhere in China
for testing then flashing.
Being able to run something like this with ONLY the bootloader present
would be a big plus I think:
$ newtmgr -c serial image upload bin/bleuart/apps/bleuart/bleuart.elf.bin
As things stand today, you can only do this (I think, please correct me
if I´m wrong) if you already have a valid image flashed and shell
support enabled for newtmgr.
Is there an obstacle anyone can see about why this wouldn't be practical
to implement with only the bootloader present? We've been focused on
application level code and the peripheral side of nimble so I haven't
looked at the bootloader code at all, but will have a look to try to get
a better sense of the requirements here to use it with serial without
any sort of shell support on the application side.
K.
On 08/06/16 23:59, will sanfilippo wrote:
+1
Guess that is my one cent opinion :-) Wouldnt be hard to do and is definitely a
handy option for a certain group of folks. BTW, and this is a minor detail, I
am not so much for polling a pin; the bootloader can look at the serial port
for a certain sequence of characters. If it sees them it enters download mode.
If it doesnt see anything it likes after that (or doesnt see that sequence), it
tries to boot an image. If it cant, it just cycles back. If it boots a valid
image, all good. If it boots a bricked image, you just gotta power cycle it.
Shouldnt increase boot time too much (which is something to keep in mind imo).
On Jun 8, 2016, at 12:42 PM, marko kiiskila <[email protected]> wrote:
I’m convinced that we should have an option for using standalone boot loader
with which you can upload images. These are valid use cases.
We should make that happen.
