What is the best and simplest way to learn OTA and bootloader concepts ?

[isikli]

I have watched ST's offical YouTube series about bootloder and  I found it very clear and helpful.

That series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM7yYW7w7MWms-Um-dHxbftXRUFT74u9l

I was able to understand the general workflow and main ideas. However, I still feel that I have some missing points, especially the pratical and low-level details.

I am a junior embedded software developer and I would like to properly learn bootloder and OTA update concepts from the ground up.


That's my questions are here : 

1) From which topics should a junior embedded developer start in order to understand bootloader and OTA mechanisms correctly ?

2) What fundemental topics should I focus on first ?

3) I have several discovery and nucleo boards, and my goal is to implement a very simple bootloader or OTA demo on one of them. 

Any guidance, recommended learning path or simple example project suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

[MStackDev_376]

Hey,

Nice to hear you are interested in learning more about the OTA concepts, especially about how it works at the low level.

To give you a starting point, you can take a look at how Mongoose implements OTA for various ST MCU families (F4/F7/H5/H7), as a case study. Mongoose is an open source networking library for embedded devices which also offers the capability to perform OTA firmware updates via a simple user-friendly API. We implement OTA at the lowest level possible, not relying on any other 3rd party libraries or drivers.

For example, here is the low-level OTA implementation for the H7 family, you can take a look to understand how flash writing and erase procedures are done at the deepest level, which you can then use to implement your bootloader OTA procedures.

We also provide full documentation and video tutorials for anyone interested in learning how to easily build a complete Mongoose networking app with OTA capabilities from scratch.

Heads up: I am part of the Mongoose development team, I hope this helps you in your learning process