Table of Contents

Overview

This application demonstrates the secondary bootloader operations to manage updates to the application image using Over-The-Air (OTA) Updates.

The CC3200’s primary bootloader executes from the ROM (hence cannot be modified) and loads the user’s application image residing in serial flash to the microcontroller’s RAM and transfers the execution control. The user’s application image saved to the CC3200 file system in serial flash is named /sys/mcuimg.bin. For the OTA application, we require two stage bootloading. In this case, the primary bootloader would load /sys/mcuimg.bin which would then act as the secondary boot loader.

The secondary bootloader could be used as an effective tool to load and execute binary images from the serial flash after making a choice from multiple binary images available in the storage.

Normal boot is meant as any boot like POR, hibernate, WDT reset, MCU reset etc. The only exception being one boot cycle just after an OTA update. The trade-off here is the application bootloader run time size which increases from 16KB to 32KB when FAST_BOOT is defined. To work with this application bootloader the user (or OTA) application needs to be re-compiled and linked to run from 0x2000_8000.

Fast boot does not turn on the networking subsystem for loading the application image during the normal boot, reduces the overall loading time of the application image during normal boot, and improves the overall initialization time of the application.

Application Details

Focus of this specific example is to enable the developer to create a roll-back option. This application will be flashed as /sys/mcuimg.bin which in turn can manage three user images in serial flash and would be responsible for selecting one of the following three application images.

  1. /sys/mcuimg1.bin - Factory Default (This would be flashed to the system during production flow)
  2. /sys/mcuimg2.bin - Application Image (Updated)
  3. /sys/mcuimg3.bin - Application Image (Updated)

After loading the images, they can be tested to make sure that the updated image is not corrupt. In case of any corruption, the system can roll back to the last known working application image. (This step is not part of this application. Please refer to the OTA Update example.)

For more details on the application bootloader and the OTA Update process, see the OTA Application Note at cc3200_sdk/docs/CC3200_OTA_Update_Application_Note.pdf.

Source Files briefly explained

Usage

This application uses an optimizedo version of the SimpleLink library for network functionality. The following section lists the steps for recompiling this application.

CCS

  1. Import the SimpleLink project from cc3200_sdk/simplelink/ccs
  2. Go to Build Configurations->Set Active and select NON_OS.
  3. In the project properties, go to CCS build->ARM Compiler->Optimization and set optimization level to “3 Interprocedure Optimizations”.
  4. Go to CCS build->ARM Archiver->Basic Options. Set output file name to “${ProjName}_opt.a”
  5. Rebuild the simplelink project.
  6. Import the bootmgr project from cc3200_sdk\example\application_bootloader\bootmgr\ccs
  7. Rebuild the bootmgr project to generate application_bootloader.bin.

IAR

  1. Open the SimpleLink project from cc3200_sdk\simplelink\ewarm\simplelink.ewp
  2. Select the NON_OS project configuration
  3. Go to project->Options->C/C++ Compiler->Optimizations->Level and set to “Medium”
  4. Go to project->options->Library Builder and make sure the output file name is changed to “simplelink_opt.a”.
  5. Rebuild the simplelink project.
  6. Open the bootmgr project from cc3200_sdk\example\application_bootloader\bootmgr\ewarm\bootmgr.ewp
  7. Rebuild the bootmgr project. This will generate application_bootloader.bin.

GCC

Execute the below command on Cygwin in cc3200_sdk/simplelink/gcc:

make -f Makefile\_opt target=NONOS

Limitations