<\/p>\n
In LCD88 I use internal flash as storage for model definitions. Of course, these should be editable without reflashing all firmware:-)<\/p>\n
On AVR chips writing to flash is only possible from bootloader section, so I needed such feature in my bootloader. Time was passing by and I was very surprised that I can’t find ready-made solution. More surprising was that on Arduino forum writing to flash by application was perceived as ‘mission impossible’. Every topic about it ended by failure or with getting external memory for storage (flash, fram or simply SD card), or advice to write your own bootloader:-)<\/p>\n My conclusion after all this research was: I must write my own bootloader or contribute to some other project to add such functionality. Then I gave a first look at the code of Optiboot, it’s issues and I found issue #52<\/a> with one promising patch at the end. But this patch didn’t fit to my needs, as I need fill-erase-write sequence to not using RAM as buffer, and it doesn’t do that that way.<\/p>\n A year passed by and I returned to Optiboot. This time I was going to do it by mysef. It was time of learning C, hacks used in avr-gcc, bugs in different verions of avr-gcc, learning Github flows, branching, merging, even writing in Arduino as I needed to provide some working example of using this feature. But finally I made it! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Optiboot with possibility to write to flash by applications could be downloaded from my ‘supermaster’ branch (also with some fixes not available yet in upstream): https:\/\/github.com\/majekw\/optiboot\/tree\/supermaster<\/a>. It includes also example Arduino sketch (flash_program<\/em>, heavily commented) writing to flash using new Optiboot.<\/p>\n So, feel free to use this long waited feature in Arduino world, and spread new, now better Optiboot bootloader.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" History In LCD88 I use internal flash as storage for model definitions. Of course, these should be editable without reflashing all firmware:-) On AVR chips writing to flash is only possible from bootloader section, so I needed such feature in …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[38,50,41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1647"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1735,"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647\/revisions\/1735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/majek.sh\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI adapted my old X-MODEM bootloader to provide some entry points to functions writing flash. But because of using X-MODEM as communication protocol, using it was quite difficult for ordinary people. Then, I came up with idea that bootloader compatible with Arduino could solve this accessibility issue.
\nNowadays, all things that can be invented, are invented and done by some people, so I started to find ready-made bootloader with all needed features. Most promising was Optiboot<\/a>, but it lacked possibility to use it for writing flash by application.<\/p>\nWriting to flash<\/h1>\n