+1 for bootloader-only serial programming
All the best Wayne On 23 September 2016 at 10:46, Kevin Townsend <ke...@adafruit.com> wrote: > 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 <ma...@runtime.io> 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. >>> >>> >
