Over-the-air firmware upgrade in Kinetis

[almarto]

Dear all,

We are planning a new project development which must include "OTA firmware upgrade". We have previous experience with kinetis KE and KL families and would like to go ahead using them if possible. As far as I have read, these families don't support flash swap mechanism and so, we don't know how to face this issue if we want to keep on using them. Could you suggest any design idea to implement OTA with these kinetis families?

Which Kinetis families support flash swap mechanism for over-the-air firmware upgrade? I understand that K family does ... but any other one?

For remote access to our embedded controller we use GPRS communications. We can download new hex file from a IoT platform.

Thank you very much for your assistance.

BR

[mjbcswitzerland]

Hi

If you don't find a solution you can check out the uTasker loaders since they operate on KE and KL devices with a requirement from 2k Flash, are fail safe without needing swap flash and support encryption/authentication. In case of limited internal storage an inexpensive SPI Flash can be used for new code to be saved to, making even very small Kinetis parts possible.
"Bare-mimimal" loader: http://www.utasker.com/docs/uTasker/uTasker_BM_Loader.pdf (used for 10 years in Coldfire, LPC and Kinetis based products)
Classical serial loaders: http://www.utasker.com/docs/uTasker/uTaskerSerialLoader.PDF

Builds with KDS, CW, S32, IAR, Keil, Atollic, Rowley, Greenhills, CooCox, GCC and VS and allows real-time simulation for testing, debugging, analysing etc.

Regards

Mark

[almarto]

Thank you very much for your comment Mark! We use a KL17 microcontroller with ROM bootloader and I would like to know if this solution is compatible with our product.

BR,

alvaro

[mjbcswitzerland]

Hi Alvaro

The solution can be used with devices with or without ROM bootloader.

From another thread I see that you are already saving the new program to SPI Flash, which is exactly how the "Bare-Minimal" loader can work. It supports the following SPI Flash devices out-of-the-box:
- Atmel AT45dbxx (B and D parts of any size)
- Spansion s25fl1-k devices
- SST sst25 devices
- ST Micro STM25 parts (program or data Flash of any size)
- Winbond w25q parts

Other devices are easy to adapt to if needed. Also the process is fully simulated in VisualStudio for analysis, adapting, etc.

Regards

Mark