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CAN Bootloader

CAN Bootloader

Owned by Roni Kant
Last updated: 2025-03-28 by Spiro JinargyrosVersion comment
1 min read

Table of Contents

Introduction

The purpose of this project is to implement OTA firmware updates for our CAN peripheral boards. The OTA firmware update would be driven by the DroneCAN bus master, such as ArduPilot. This will allow us to continue to update our boards' firmware even after harnessing and physical assembly is complete without having to remove the board for programming.

DroneCAN Bootloader

The OTA firmware update will be done through a uavcan.protocol.file.BeginFirmwareUpdate message (see 7. List of standard data types - DroneCAN ). We can use uavcan.protocol.file.GetInfo to compare current firmware version to the one available on the ArduPilot file server and decide if a firmware update is necessary.

 Scope

Must have:

  • Able to flash boards OTA using DroneCAN

Must have:

  • Able to flash boards OTA using DroneCAN

Nice to have:

  • Keep previous copies

  • Be able to revert?

  •  

Not in scope:

  •  

  • Bus master (flight controller) receives image from missionplanner

  • Bus master sends CAN message to peripherals, will trigger an interrupt

  • Peripheral will jump to bootloader

  • Bus master then sends image and to peripherals in bunches of bytes

  • Bootloader has 1 slot for staging, 1 slot for the application

  • Bootloader will write the bytes into the staging slot as it receives bytes

  • Once all bytes are received, copy all bytes into the application slot

  • Application will run again with updated code

Resources

 

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