Design and Implementation of Partial Firmware Upgrade

Sammanfattning: Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU) is now widely used on PC and smartphones for users to enjoy the latest applications. The project is derived from the new device of Yohoo and the firmware embedded in the system. This system can guide users on how to breathe through multiple sensory effects to reduce the harm from excessive stress. In order to be applied by different people, some breathing courses and personal settings will be used in the system, which makes the upgrade of the internal firmware of the device more important. However, the firmware upgrade for some embedded devices is not as rapid and convenient as PC and smartphones, which is still erasing and then programming the whole storage. This is a waste of time and meaningless wear to the entire device. In order to solve this problem and improve the efficiency of the firmware upgrade, the partial firmware upgrade is proposed in this project, and the storage method of new codes is improved to get better performance during the partial DFU process. The idea of wear leveling is introduced to extend the lifetime of the internal storage. As a result, the partial firmware upgrade feature was successfully designed and implemented, and integrated and tested on new devices. At the end of this work, the prototype system of the embedded software based on the nRF52832 microcontroller has basically been designed, improved and tested, and some functions which need to be updated instead of the whole firmware can be transmitted via Bluetooth and work normally. For the specific case of partial DFU, the firmware package size that maximizes the update efficiency is obtained through testing. In addition, the flash module in the chip has been divided into multiple portions for the update. The wear-leveling method ensures that when a certain function is updated multiple times, one certain part of the flash will not be overused, but the entire block will be used uniformly to alleviate the adverse effects of data abnormality or loss caused by damaged bits of the flash memory. In addition, the lifetime of the flash memory is prolonged and the industrial waste is reduced at the same time.