New official flashing tools: Web Flasher and thingino-dfu (cloner is now legacy)

[gtxaspec]

Flashing thingino onto your camera just got a lot easier. We now have two officially supported tools, and both work on every Ingenic chip thingino supports: T10, T20, T21, T23, T30, T31, T32, T40, T41, A1, and C100. The chip is detected automatically, so you never have to figure out which SoC variant your camera has.

The easy way: flash from your browser

webflash.thingino.com

No software to install, no command line. The whole process runs locally in your browser, and nothing is ever uploaded anywhere.

1. Open webflash.thingino.com in Chrome or Edge (Firefox and Safari do not support WebUSB)
2. Put your camera into USB boot mode and connect it to your computer with a USB cable (guide)
3. Click Connect and select the device in the browser popup
4. The flasher detects your chip automatically and prepares the camera for flashing
5. Pick your firmware (the built-in release picker or a local .bin file) and click Write

That's it. When the write finishes, the camera can reboot straight into thingino.

No firmware download needed: enable the prebuilt thingino release picker in the flasher's Settings and you can flash straight from the official thingino releases. The flasher detects your chip, shows only the images that fit your camera, then downloads, checksum-verifies, and flashes the latest build in one click.

Windows users: Windows needs a one-time driver install before your browser (or the CLI tool) can talk to the camera. Run the free Zadig utility and install the WinUSB driver for the device. The flasher has a built-in Windows driver help guide right on the page, and the Windows Setup section of the README walks through it step by step.

Bonus for new installs: enable Show Pre-configure in the flasher's Settings and you can bake your WiFi credentials and an SSH key directly into the image before flashing. Your camera connects to your network on its very first boot, no serial cable or button dance needed.

The command line tool: thingino-dfu

If you prefer a terminal, or want to script things, thingino-dfu is the same engine as the web flasher in CLI form. Builds are available for Linux (x86_64 and aarch64), Windows, macOS, and Android on the releases page.

thingino-dfu -b            # boot the camera into flashing mode (auto-detects the chip)
thingino-dfu -w image.bin  # write a firmware image
thingino-dfu -r backup.bin # read the flash back (make a backup!)

It can also do full-chip erases (--erase), reboot the camera when done (--reboot), and even flash devices connected to a remote machine (--host). On Windows, the same one-time Zadig driver setup applies (see Windows Setup).

What happened to cloner?

Both thingino-cloner and the official Ingenic Cloner are now legacy methods and are no longer officially supported. They rely on Ingenic's proprietary cloner protocol, which needed per-chip configuration and workarounds and offered no way to verify what actually landed in flash.

The new tools instead use the industry-standard USB DFU protocol, with the camera running mainline U-Boot. The bootloader on the camera owns the flash layout and the host just moves bytes, which makes flashing faster, verifiable, and identical on every supported chip. It is all standard tooling: any DFU host works, even plain dfu-util, and nothing depends on reverse-engineered vendor protocols. There is no reason to use cloner anymore; if an older guide tells you to use it, use the web flasher instead.

Links

• Web flasher: https://webflash.thingino.com/
• thingino-dfu source and downloads: https://github.com/wltechblog/thingino-dfu
• USB boot guide: https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki/USB-Boot-Mode

Questions and feedback welcome below. Happy flashing!