(TECH) Upgrading/Flashing firmware without Windows

Hi there!
Historically, I have absolutely no Windows PCs, but, it seems, I need to upgrade the firmware on RePhone to fix issues with debug port.

Despite of all RePhone documentation is entirely windows based (which is separate issue to discuss), I mostly able to do needed things on Linux. But, it seems, that MTK’s LinkIt Firmware Flasher exists only for Windows, and it is no any documentation about the process, how do it working nor it’s source code. And it doesn’t seem it works under Wine.

So, to be honest, I’m in very frustrating situation now.

Can somebody help me in that situation?

Hi,

Recently (a day ago :wink:) Stefan Mandl came with a solution for uploading programs from GNU/Linux, no need to have a Windows machine or use the MSD (massive storage device) which requires a reset before and after upload.

You can visit Stefan’s place or mine to get the uploader.py script.

Of course, this is not for uploading the main firmware (it is closed source RTOS), only the main sketch running after reset. For that, there is no alternative to the FirmwareUploader.exe Windows tool.

Regards,
Roberto.

Hi!
Actually, I exactly talked about “main firmware”, which is closed RTOS, and, @dbelam already noticed me about existence of suitable API function, but it is a bin unclear, what actually should be used to flash:
API documentation says

But “SEEED02A_DEMO_BB.cfg” file in FirmwareUpdater directory, which is, as far as I understood wiki article about reflashing, used to flash RePhone by FirmwareUpdater, has a mention of “SEEED02A_DEMO_BOOTLOADER_V005_MT2502_MAUI_11CW1418SP5_W15_19.bin” (7Kb file), but not of file exactly named “image.bin”, which is there too, and has a size of 4.7Mb.

So, for now I just curious, what of that files is RePhone’s firmware. Or, even, if “image.bin” is RePhone firmware, or some general LinkIt Device’s :wink:

And, yes, I need to upgrade the firmware (RTOS), because SeeedStudio member said that it is required to fix issue with debug port (which doesn’t work on stock firmware and sends some scrambled output)

And yes, thanks for the uploader script for VXPs. Nice thing :wink:

Hi,

Thank you for your interesting contribution. As far as I could understand the ‘image.bin’ has to be on the root of the rephone storage to update it with the API Function. The storage use a windows base file system “c:”

The next question is how can manage to fit the image .bin (4.7M) with a working firmware flasher on a 5M a storage place…

The .bin in the .cfg must do the trick… Why is an open source product development stuck for non-open windows bin…

Hope that the open users wil show one more time that a motivated and curious community can help anything be open.

A Guy with a Raspberry Pi