rf24boot: A universal over-the-air bootloader for all those uCs

Apparently I’ve come up to a point, when I want to do firmware upgrades for my home automation ‘over-the-air’. Since I’m using nRF24L01 dongles, I decided to write a bootloader for that.
While my pet antares project is slowly progressing towards the 0.2-rc2 release (honestly, really slowly), I’ve added the nice and shiny RF24 library (A port of maniacbug’s arduino library to pure C with no arduino dependences) to interface with nrf24L01 2.4Ghz dongles. I also fixed a few nasty race conditions out there on the way, but those are totally a different story.
So, what’s inside:

snapshot15

  1. Portable: Supports AVR out of the box, all other MCUs that are supported by antares can be easily added (STM32 is the next target).
  2. Hardware or software SPI for avr: you choose
  3. Configurable bootloader timeout, leave condition, etc.
  4. Secure: Bootloader can easily be disabled by a jumper.
  5. Easy: state-of-the-art menuconfig with all the options you might ever want to change.
  6. Small. Bloated. Fits into 4KB (AVR) with all debugging disabled. I tried to make it as small as possible, playing with gcc flags you don’t want to know about, but this looks pretty much like the hard limit. Unless I want to make the code an unreadable, unportable assembly mess
  7. Reliable: Handles most of the cases when data, ack, or both are lost.
  8. Extensible: You can define your own partitions with your own memory programming routines without ever having to dive into the core of the bootloader or the protocol.
  9. Even if you decide to do so, the core state machine is dumb and simple and fits into less than 150 lines of code.
  10. OpenSource: GPLv2 FTW!

Okay, what about the programming dongle? For now I use my uISP with nRF24L01 mounted on top. Not the best solution, but works good enough. I relayed most of the RF24 API via usb, so the actual protocol handling is done on the PC side for added flexibility.

IMG_20131230_195601IMG_20131230_195608IMG_20140227_180006

 

nrf24l01 are quite fast things, 2MBPS FTW! With a proper dongle the flash programming speed would be the bottleneck. For the sake of simplicity and ease of porting I didn’t make use of the IRQ line, so this might slow us down just a little bit. You know, doing things async is always faster. Still, flash or eeprom writing speed is not the bottleneck right now. VUSB’s performance is. For now it is sufficient for small things, but I really think to make a proper STM32-based USB dongle for that in future with proper buffering on the dongle side. This promises to be waaay faster, than the current slowpoke implementation. Here’s a little bit of those sucky performance measurements:

necromant@ilwyn:~/Dev/antares-playground/rf24-slave/rf24tool$ time ./rf24tool --part flash --file out.bin --read
nRF24L01 over-the-air programmer
(c) Necromant 2013-2014 <andrew [at] ncrmnt.org> 
 
Local Address:  00:01:02:03:03
Remote Address: 00:01:02:03:04
Channel:        76 
Rate:           2MBPS 
PA Level:       Max
 
Waiting for target....FOUND!
Target: rfboot-test
Endianness: little
Number of partitions: 2
0. eeprom size 1024 iosize 16 pad 0
1. flash size 32768 iosize 16 pad 128
Reading partition flash: 7ff0 32768/32768 cont 6     
 
Done!
Have a nice day!
 
real    0m27.870s
user    0m0.016s
sys     0m0.072s

Say hello to the dialup speeds, did you miss ’em?

Anyway, here goes the tasty stuff, published under GPLv2 License with ObDev’s exception:

https://github.com/nekromant/rf24boot

Want to compile and use – See README.compiling
Want to start hacking on the bootloader? Fork on github, read the README.HACKING and don’t forget to send your merge requests.
Want to help out with something else (stm32-based dongle?), or just submit your own tool that works with the bootloader so that I can link to it? See ‘contact’ for my email.

Enjoy.

2 thoughts on “rf24boot: A universal over-the-air bootloader for all those uCs

  1. Hi good day.
    Well, I have some suggestions and questions.

    Exactly how the bootloader work? I mean (Give a timeout when starting or comes into that state the microcontroller?)

    On the other hand, I see that you use a atmega with the library VUSB (know her as long ago), but .. connect to that lib from any OS, is really tired,
    I recommend you see this project: “HID-class USB Serial”

    http://rayshobby.net/hid-class-usb-serial-communication-for-avrs-using-v-usb/

    Write your Host Software using “Processing”..

    Benefits?
    Many, you have a lot of libraries available, and most interestingly, only one code for all platforms.

    Please me really support you in your project, but I not have enough knowledge of c ++, besides the VUSB not like, I would like to be through serial communication, it could carry the project to a smartphone by module bluetooth hc-05 or my PlayStation Portable even through its serial port. XD

    Well, make a definite function of sending data to the slave would help me a lot with my wishes to port to other platforms even imagine an Arduino with a nokia screen and a sd with a slave rf24 programming: D xD

    They are only ideas, but because if take any suggestion or read this message I would like your opinion, yet I imagine he will say aid is received ..
    greetings XD

    1. > Exactly how the bootloader work? I mean (Give a timeout when starting or comes into that state the microcontroller?)

      Can be configured. See menuconfig. Timed, wait till host instructs to boot, etc. I’ll bump the READMEs and add API docs soon. Too much work right now.

      > I recommend you see this project: “HID-class USB Serial”

      Seen that. As well as ACM implementation. Too much overhead and it is NOT really needed. Current implementation makes use of double (on the host + on the MCU) buffering of packets and achieves nearly the maximum possible bandwidth that vusb is capable to provide + exposes all the radio features for the host to use. My next step is portability to nrf24lu1 radio dongles.

      > Write your Host Software using “Processing”..

      Sorry, this s not going to happen. Processing is not really suitable for any real-life applications, save for learning how to code. It’s not even a real language, more like a set libraries with questionable quality.

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