Hi µTasker users!

Software updates are an important topic and with Internet capable devices come new demands for Internet based software updates.

The µTasker has long enabled IP support in numerous projects - but now it is also getting serious about Internet software update support.

For this reason I am very please to announce new support for this in the M5223X development project - support for other platforms is only a matter of time and I will keep you posted once there have been changes.

Although TFTP updates may be added shortly, this is not the priority. TFTP is used by a number of boot software implementation and can be useful (all have their pos and cons as usual) but the µTasker offers support which we call the µTasker "bare-minimum" loader and it is intended to be the ultimately small boot loader allowing real and safe Internet uploads based on methods like HTTP Post. It is working on the M5223X and required one FLASH sector of 2k in size - the application parts remains compatible apart from having a new start address at 0x800 rather than the typical 0x0.

I plan to get a board online so that anyone interested can upload real code from a Browser to test it out and to verify its stability.

Here are results of updates of projects of around 70k code size on the M52235 EVB:

- update times of 5..6s (including post of the new data, verifications [CRC-16 over the code and some basic authentication], deleting old program, copying new code, verification again, and finally deleting intermediate data from FLASH).

Power downs during the process cause no loss of data;-))

The documentation (describing the technique and its implementation) is available at the following address: http://www.utasker.com/docs/uTasker/uTaskerBootLoader.PDF

I think that this is an important additional feature which should benefit many projects. It will be fully integrated in the next official µTasker release but in the mean time Beta testers are most welcome. Just contact me and I will help get it working in your present project.

Regards

Mark

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