[SUGGESTION] How to add Firmware to your project

[wayneft]

Dave,
First off I'd like to say this is an awesome blog, I really enjoy watching your videos. My suggestion goes along with your last few blogs about bringing products to market.  In one of your blogs you talked about throwing a micro in your design and adding firmware to minimize others from copying and selling your designs.  Why not do an instructional video of how to add firmware to your design and how you would go about packaging up firmware updates that get sent out to the customer and how they would install them.

You could do a simple project with an Arduino and run through it start to finish.

Just a suggestion.

Wayne

[Simon]

i put a MCU in my current project. It did partly start as a copy protection but as the project evolved into something much more complex with my wanting room for further developments it's become a necessity. In my case I'd not plan on any updates but if i did I'd sent a replacement unit out and have the old one back for upgrading.

[alm]

Some Asian companies will unlock a MCU for $500, after that, the firmware can be read. You might stop the casual cloner, but not anyone willing to spend a small amount of money.

[Simon]

oh yes of that I'm aware, it was the wannabe garage hobbiest that might think he can make a few bob off my back i aimed to stop. the thing does not have a huge market opening so not the sort of thing a company will bother to copy or will get to hear about in time to have enough market left to make it worth while

[RayJones]

LOL, reminds of the time when some multimeters that used the Intersil (7106?) chip for the display / sampling simply bent the leads 180 degrees about before insertion into the PCB!

This would be a little bit harder these days with SMD 0.5 mm pitch without snapping pins off when you looked at it but yeah, a cheap way of slowing down the smarty pant esp if you grind *both* sides of the chip to make it less obvious. 

[Simon]

hehe thats clever, get them copying it all backwards and wondering why the clone blows on power up, especially those nice old chips that had power and GND on opposite corners

[RayJones]

LOL, the practice must have become so common because according to a quick google, you can actually buy the Intersil 7106-R where the pins are already reversed for you! (supposedly for mounting under the PCB).

www.intersil.com/data/fn/fn3082.pdf

[Simon]

hehe not the sort of thing that would work now as we are so aware of these "tricks"

[wayneft]

I guess my suggestion was more centered around how you would embed firmware updates as an option for the end user.  If I prototype something on an arduino and then move the design to a pcb that has USB access, how would the end user go about downloading the firmware update to the unit? 

[Simon]

if you want it to be so that the end user can update it you would probably need a chip that has a usb port and can be programmed from it

[alm]

As long as your product has a USB port, it shouldn't be hard to use a correct bootloader (USB or UART if you use something like an FT232). Any MCU supporting self-programming (which at least AVR is basically all of them, although I'm not sure about the 6-pin ATtinys) should support this.

[Zad]

One method of updating that is becoming popular is that of using an SD card. SD sockets are pretty cheap, and the software overhead needed to access them is much lower than USB, especially if used in serial mode.