NOTE: The bootloader has been superseded by the LoRa Basics™ Loader, which can be found here: https://github.com/lorabasics/basicloader

The Bootloader

TrackNet is excited to contribute to the LoRaWAN™ ecosystem by open-sourcing the firmware updates over-the-air (FUOTA) portion of its end-device LoRaWAN stack.

One important component of this stack is an update-capable bootloader. This loader supports the unpacking and installing of new firmware on an end-device.

Over the next few days, we will start migrating our internal codebase to this public repository, where we will then continue to evolve and maintain this component. This file will be updated as this process continues.

Update 1

Tue, Mar 20 2018

The bootloader skeleton and build environment have been migrated to this new repository. We recommend the use of a recent Ubuntu distribution as build host. We use gcc-arm-embedded from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~team-gcc-arm-embedded/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

To build, change into the target board's build directory and type make:

cd build/boards/B-L072Z-LRWAN1
make

You'll end up with a file called bootloader.hex that can be loaded onto the B-L072Z-LRWAN1 STM32 LoRa™ Discovery kit. Since there is no valid firmware yet, the LED LD2 will be flashing the corresponding error sequence (SYNC-2-2-1).

Update 2

Thu, Mar 22 2018

To make this a bit more interesting, an example firmware has been added to the repository. This simple application will just print "Hello World" and some information about the bootloader and firmware to the UART (115200/8N1).

The bootloader expects the firmware to have a valid header with CRC and length. Because this information cannot be produced by the complier/linker, a tool is provided that can patch this information in the firmware hex file.

The patch tool is written in Python. It is tested with Python 3.6 and requires the package intelhex package to be installed.

To build the application, change into the example's directory and type make:

cd example/stm32l0
make

This produces a file called hello.hex which can then be loaded onto the B-L072Z-LRWAN1 STM32 LoRa™ Discovery kit. Make sure you have also loaded the bootloader previously. Upon startup, you should something like this on the serial port:

----------------------
Hello World!
Build:      Mar 22 2018 10:57:16
Bootloader: 0x00000100
Firmware:   0x64861573