@zerobytellc/zerobyte-firmware-utils

zerobyte-firmware-utils

Firmware download and OTA update utility functions for IoT Devices designed by Zero Byte LLC. This library is released under Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivatives 4.0 International. See LICENSE.txt.

Copyright © 2023 Zero Byte LLC, All Rights Reserved

Installation

Install package from npm

npm install --save @zerobytellc/zerobyte-firmware-utils

or yarn

yarn add @zerobytellc/zerobyte-firmware-utils

Features

• Version 0.0.1 has the initial API for downloading firmware updates so they do not need to be bundled in your applications.
• Version 0.0.2 has minor bug and documentation fixes.

Usage

The module uses ES6 style export statement, simply use import to load the module.

import { ZeroByteFW } from '@zerobytellc/zerobyte-firmware-utils';

Check for Firmware Updates

In order to check for firmware updates for a device, you must know two tokens:

• Client Name Token
• Device Model Token

If you do not know what tokens to use, contact Tim for more information.

Obtaining FW Information

To obtain information about the latest available firmware for your device, use the get_latest_fw_info method as shown here. This method returns an array of FirmwareInformation instances which describe the latest available firmware version. Occasionally, a firmware update may be packaged as a multi-part update. Incase of a multi-part update, there will be multiple entries provided. It is critical that multi-part updates be applied to the device in the order returned here.

let client_token = 'zerobytellc';   // Contact ZBL if you do not have your token
let device_token = 'model_a';       // The device identifier

ZeroByteFW.get_latest_fw_info(client_name, device_token)
    .then((fw_entries) => {
        fw_entries.forEach((entry) => {
            console.log(
                '%s ver %s can be downloaded here: %s\n' +
                'MD5: %s',
                entry.name,
                entry.version,
                entry.url,
                entry.md5
            );
        });
    });

Each entry returned has three properties:

1. name the name of the firmware file
2. version the version of the firmware file
3. md5 the md5 sum of the firmware file
4. url the url to download the firmware file. Note: do not cache this url, it is subject to change.

Downloading FW Updates

For convenience, a utility method is provided to download the URLs to the local filesystem, download_fw(fw_info) : string. The method takes the firmware info returned by get_latest_fw_info, downloads the target to the local filesystem, and then returns path to the downloaded file.

let client_token = 'zerobytellc';   // Contact ZBL if you do not have your token
let device_token = 'model_a';       // The device identifier

ZeroByteFW.get_latest_fw_info(client_name, device_token)
    .then((fw_entries) => {
        fw_entries.forEach((entry) => {
            let local_path = ZeroByteFW.download_fw(entry);
            console.log(
                '%s firmware version %s downloaded to: %s',
                entry.name, 
                entry.version, 
                local_path);
            
            // Load file from local_path and apply to device via OTA here.
        });
    });

An alternative implementation:

let client_token = 'zerobytellc';   // Contact ZBL if you do not have your token
let device_token = 'model_a';       // The device identifier
let local_paths = [];

// Retrieve the latest fw info:
let fw_entries = await ZeroByteFW.get_latest_fw_info(
    client_token,
    device_token
);

for (let i = 0; i < fw_entries.length; ++i) {
    // Download each firmware to a temporary path in the local filesystem
    let entry = fw_entries[i];
    let path  = await ZeroByteFW.download_fw(entry);

    local_paths.push(path);
}

// local_paths now contains the list of downloaded firmware files 
// to apply to the device over the air.

Conditional Update Checks

Optionally, you can specify your device's current firmware version. If the current device firmware is the same as the most recently published firmware, then no results will be returned.

let client_token = 'zerobytellc';           // Contact ZBL if you do not have your token
let device_token = 'model_a';               // The device identifier
let current_device_fw = '20220101.abc1234'; // Read this from the device.

ZeroByteFW.get_latest_fw_info(client_name, device_token, current_device_fw)
    .then((fw_entries) => {
        // Nothing will be returned if current_device_fw is already the latest.
    });

Conditional Update Checks

Version 0.1.0 introduces error codes for indicating various error conditions. See ZeroByteErrorCodes.js for a list of codes that may be thrown by this API.

ZeroByteFW.get_latest_fw_info(client_name, device_token, current_device_fw)
    .then((fw_entries) => {
        // Nothing will be returned if current_device_fw is already the latest.
    })
    .catch((error) => {
       switch(error) {
           case FIRMWARE_INDEX_UNAVAILABLE:
               console.log('Unable to retrieve the current firmware index at this time.');
               break;
           case FIRMWARE_INDEX_MALFORMED:
               console.log('Unable to parse firmware index as valid JSON response.');
               break;
           case FIRMWARE_INDEX_DEVICE_UNKNOWN:
               console.log('device_token is not listed in the firmware index.');
               break;
           case FIRMWARE_INDEX_LATEST_VERSION_UNKNOWN:
               console.log('Unable to determine the latest firmware version from the firmware index (index is malformed).');
               break;
           case FIRMWARE_BUNDLE_UNAVAILABLE:
               console.log('Unable to retrieve the firmware gbl file from the URL provided in the firmware index.');
               break;
           case UNKNOWN_ERROR:
               console.log('Some other unexpected error condition occurred.');
               break;
               
               
       } 
    });

Applying Firmware Updates

This section is incomplete

The simplest approach is to use the turn-key startDFU method. startDFU checks or firmware updates as described above, and, if found, applies them to the device.

This relies on you having already initialized a BleManager from the react-native-ble-plx API.

import {BleManager} from 'react-native-ble-plx';

const bleManager = new BleManager();

ZeroByteDFU.startDFU(
    
)