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

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 From Zero Byte LLC's Servers

If Zero Byte LLC manages your firmware distribution, then follow this section. If you manage firmware distributions on your own infrastructure, then skip below to Obtaining Firmware Information from your own server

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 these 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.
5. apploader (optional) the name of the entry in the index that contains the pre-requisite apploader for this firmware

Obtaining Firmware Information from your own server

By default, firmware indices and bundles are obtained from https://firmware.zerobytellc.com/firmware/, however, many client will wish to deploy their own firmware distribution server. To support this, the get_latest_fw_info method takes several additional optional parameters:

1. current_fw_version: If specified, then this will be checked against the latest version number in the firmware index. If they match, then no updates are returned, indicating that your current firmware version is already the latest. See Conditional Update Checks below for details.
2. channel: The release channel for the firmware bundles, e.g. alpha, beta, prod, etc. Defaults to prod
3. url_base: The base URL from which to build the path to the firmware index. Firmware indices are expected to be found at ${url_base}/${client_name}/${channel}/index.json. The value of url_base must begin with the protocol to use, e.g. http:// or https://

let client_token = 'zerobytellc';   // Contact ZBL if you do not have your token
let device_token = 'model_a';       // The device identifier
let firmware_server_url = 'https://myfirmware.mycompany.org/'
let release_channel = 'prod'

/*
 * Retrieve the firmware index from 
 *    https://myfirmware.mycompany.org/zerobytellc/model_a/prod/index.json
 *    |-------------------------------/-----------/-------/----/index.json
 *                 |                         |        |     |
 *                 |                         |        |     +-- release_channel
 *                 |                         |        +-------- device_token
 *                 |                         +----------------- client_name
 *                 +------------------------------------------- url_base
 */
ZeroByteFW.get_latest_fw_info(client_name, device_token, undefined, release_channel, firmware_server_url)
    .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
            );
        });
    });

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 from %2 to: %s',
                entry.name, 
                entry.version, 
                entry.url,
                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.
    })    
    .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 library provides a full turn-key method to apply the latest firmware update to your device: ZeroByteDFU.startDFU(...) which takes the following parameters:

This is meant to be a helpful utility but is really only provided as a source code reference for how you might implement it in your own applications. Feel free to use it if you find it helpful, Zero Byte LLC uses it in their own applications, but the turn key implementation is a complete end-to-end workflow which may not meet your specific needs.

1. peripheralId The device.id of the device to update
2. bleManager The initialized BleManager instance from the application
3. clientName The name of the client
4. deviceName The device's hardware identifier ... 'A' for Kraken, 'B' for Range Extender ... don't ask why, it just is.
5. channel The firmware update channel from which the index.json is retrieved (e.g. "prod", "beta", "alpha" or "dev")
6. currentFWVersion (optional, default: undefined). The current FW version used on the device
7. url_base (optional, default; https://firmware.zerobytellc.com/firmware/). The url_base from which to retrieve the firmware index.
8. isInOTA optional (default: false). Set to true if the device is already in DFU mode prior to the update.
9. onDone callback invoked after DFU has completed: (string)=>void
10. onProgress callback invoked repeatedly throughout the DFU process: (number)=>void where number = percent complete
11. updateStatus callback invoked to pass a status message to the application for display: (string)=>void

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();
const myDevice = undefined; // Use bleManager to discover a device ... out of scope for this tutorial.

await ZeroByteDFU.startDFU(
    myDevice.id,
    bleManager,
    'acme_co',
    'acme_tnt',
    'prod',
    undefined,  // Optionally pass the version of the firmware currently running on myDevice...
    'https://firmware.acme.co/',
    false,      // If myDevice was already in OTA, then this should be set to true.
    () => { console.log("Firmware update is done!"); },
    (i) => { console.log("Firmware update is " + i + "% complete"); },
    (statusMsg) => { console.log("Current status is: " + statusMsg); }
)