I’ve become aware of a serious limitation that testing should should have found, if I’d done a bit more of it! The ESP8266 only memory maps the the first 8 Mbit of the SPI flash. rBoot doesn’t use memory mapped flash, it uses SPI reads, so rBoot itself is fine with any size of flash. The problem comes if you try to put an irom section beyond 8 MBit (i.e. from address 0x40300000) – code there won’t be accessible at run time!

I’m quite disappointed about that. It’s something that rBoot can’t overcome, it’s a limitation of the ESP8266 design. You can still use the extra space on larger chips for something, like logging data, or for storing a filesystem for your resources. You can also still use rBoot OTA to flash these resources by dedicating a non-bootable rom slot to them. Your code would need to access them with SPI reads rather than through the memory mapping though.

Update: this problem has been largely mitigated, see here.

Ok, hope you’re still with me after my previous massive post. Now I’m going to show you how to perform an over-the-air (OTA) update with rBoot. I’ve covered all the background already, so this should be pretty straight forward as long as you have a simple two rom rBoot setup running.

Now add rboot.h, rboot-ota.h and rboot-ota.c to your project and call the rboot_ota_start function. How you invoke the OTA update code is up to you, the sample project on GitHub (now updated) has a simple command line interface over the UART allowing the user to enter the command “ota”.

rboot_ota_start takes an rboot_ota struct with the options for the update.

typedef struct {
	uint8 ip[4];
	uint16 port;
	uint8 *request;
	uint8 rom_slot;
	ota_callback callback;
} rboot_ota;

• ip is the ip address of the web server to download the new rom from.
• port is the web server port (usually 80).
• request is a complete http request which will be sent to the web server, this may seem like a slightly odd way to do it, but it gives you full control over what is sent and it’s the same way the SDK OTA update works.
• rom_slot is the number of the rom slot on the flash to update, starting at zero. In our two rom example that will be either 0 or 1 (and the opposite to the one we are currently running).
• callback is a user function that will be called when the update is completed (either success or failure), it is passed a pointer to the rboot_ota structure and a bool to indicate success or failure. This is where you will then switch to the new rom (using rboot_set_current_rom) and restart the device.

Example

static void ICACHE_FLASH_ATTR OtaUpdate_CallBack(void *arg, bool result) {

	char msg[40];
	rboot_ota *upServer = (rboot_ota*)arg;

	if(result == true) {
		// success, reboot
		os_sprintf(msg, "Firmware updated, rebooting to rom %d...\r\n", upServer->rom_slot);
		uart0_send(msg);
		rboot_set_current_rom(upServer->rom_slot);
		system_restart();
	} else {
		// fail, cleanup
		uart0_send("Firmware update failed!\r\n");
		os_free(upServer->request);
		os_free(upServer);
	}
}

static const uint8 ota_ip[] = {192,168,7,5};
#define HTTP_HEADER "Connection: keep-alive\r\nCache-Control: no-cache\r\nUser-Agent: rBoot-Sample/1.0\r\nAccept: */*\r\n\r\n"

static void ICACHE_FLASH_ATTR OtaUpdate() {

	uint8 slot;
	rboot_ota *ota;

	// create the update structure
	ota = (rboot_ota*)os_zalloc(sizeof(rboot_ota));
	os_memcpy(ota->ip, ota_ip, 4);
	ota->port = 80;
	ota->callback = (ota_callback)OtaUpdate_CallBack;
	ota->request = (uint8 *)os_zalloc(512);

	// select rom slot to flash
	slot = rboot_get_current_rom();
	if (slot == 0) slot = 1; else slot = 0;
	ota->rom_slot = slot;

	// actual http request
	os_sprintf((char*)ota->request,
		"GET /%s HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: "IPSTR"\r\n" HTTP_HEADER,
		(slot == 0 ? "rom0.bin" : "rom1.bin"),
		IP2STR(ota->ip));

	// start the upgrade process
	if (rboot_ota_start(ota)) {
		uart0_send("Updating...\r\n");
	} else {
		uart0_send("Updating failed!\r\n\r\n");
		os_free(ota->request);
		os_free(ota);
	}

}

It’s really that simple, that’s all you need to add to your application to be able to perform OTA updates. You might want to put in a version check, so it only updates if there is a new version, but that’s up to you.

Web Server

All that remains is to drop rom0.bin and rom1.bin in the root of your web server. Obviously you can change where it looks for the files with a small tweak to the code above.