ESP8266 OTA – user1 and user2 binaries

[parsec67]

Hi,

I can’t find how to generate OTA binaries without actually having to program the device.

Building the project will by itself not generate the binaries, for my specific device proj-0x01000.bin and  proj-0x81000.bin where ‘proj’ is my project name. These only show up after a full device programming has been made and are erased if linker script is changed from App1 to App2 or vice versa.

Is there any recommended post build step (e.g. ESPImageTool.exe?) or other option that could be used to generate user1.bin and user2.bin automatically without having to actually program the device?

Thanks

• This topic was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by parsec67. Reason: spelling

[support]

Hi,

Yes, normally just running ESPImageTool.exe <ELF file> [optional FLASH settings] should do the job.

Please feel free to look through this tutorial to get a basic understanding of ESP8266 OTA with VisualGDB: https://visualgdb.com/tutorials/esp8266/ota/

[parsec67]

Thanks, yes I looked at the OTA example but it helps me only halfway as in my application I update by polling a web server periodically. Unfortunately I have not been able to get this to work, always getting “please check the bin file” after upgrade download has started and downloaded some bytes.

I did use the ESPImageTool.exe to generate .bin files and they are correctly identified as App1 and App2. Also tried with esptool.py 2.1 using elf2image and –version=2 option but same problem with both methods. I believe this is not a VisualGDB related issue but can’t be sure, the resources I have found online are not very clear on how to identify the problem.

I noticed that when switching configurations as per tutorial example, if the Embedded Project->Default linker script is changed from App1 to App2 it will also change for all configurations. It doesn’t seem to impact the binaries and the MSBuild linker script setting is unchanged.

[parsec67]

The “please check the bin file” problem mentioned above turned out to be FileZilla not transferring .bin files in binary mode with auto-detect on so that problem is solved, nothing to do with VGDB and my project is now working satisfactory.

[support]

Hi,

Good to know it works. With linker script, VisualGDB supports 2 levels of specifying it:

• On the Project Properties page. This affects all configurations.
• On the MSBuild Settings page. This overrides the default per-project setting and affects each configuration independently.

If you would like to have different settings for different configurations, please explicitly override the linker script on the MSBuild settings page for each configuration.

[Author]

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