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What an empty article. Testing an OTA update can survive a power interruption during the downloading is such a basic test. It doesn't need an article that long. I guess AI wrote it from a few sentence prompt?
They didn't do any interesting tests. What about brownouts, voltage ripples, timing the reset signal to see if there's any critical moments in the update process, corrupted update files, high EMC environment etc etc. That would be interesting.
I think the article is an advert for a testing platform that enables automating this sort of test. But weirdly they don't show how their platform does the automating, so it just looks like they're really pleased with themselves for doing really basic engineering.
Indeed. Would be nice to have a rock-solid “correct” example to critique and learn from. And a write-up from an expert which goes into detail about all the traps for new players, what failure states / eFuse settings could be truly unrecoverable even if you have remote control of the MCU’s PWR / COM / RST pins, etc.
Years ago I had to design some robust OTA systems for both ATmega’s and ESP32’s. I was very confident that my ATmega solution could recover from absolutely any failure state that wasn’t a true “not my fault” hardware failure. At the time though, I was never quite sure if I properly covered every last edge case of the ESP32, which has significantly higher complexity of things that can go wrong from a bad OTA firmware update.
I was expecting something much more rigorous than a few trials resetting the controller at random points in its update process.
You need just enough flash ram for 2 firmwares and a proper bootloader, which knows which partition is active/verified. Simple as that. Biggest problem is getting enough flash. writing the bootloader is trivial.