Also I'm really amused by all of the people who take device firmware upgrade as some easy-peasy thing that is supposed to be completely risk free.
Try updating firmware with flaky power.. There are many things that can go wrong with firmware update.. And maybe 10 years ago, you had to return device to factory to update firmware.
Yes, there are many things that can go wrong with the update process itself. But save for actual hardware failure, there's no excuse for such failures to result in the device attempting to use the resulting corrupt firmware installation. Even yanking the power in the middle of the update process should not cause the device to fail to boot from a good firmware image because there should be enough flash to hold
at least two separate copies of the firmware.
I have few Siglent devices at my disposal and ones that I have do seem to say "verifying image" when doing upgrade.
I don't know what underlying OS /RTOS it uses and what is actual Firmware upgrade code.
Image verification should happen twice. The first should be of the image on the USB stick. The second should be of the image in flash after it's been written.
So instead of making this a bashing in all directions, I suggested to make it constructive:
Maybe a question to Siglent if they could make it more robust (not to use "foolproof" to insult more people),
Certainly this request should be made, but c'mon. Flash firmware upgrades have been a thing for
at least a decade now. If flash firmware upgrades were a relatively new thing such that the techniques were still being figured out, it might be understandable to see a problematic implementation. But at some point, the way to do something becomes standard
and obvious practice, and failure to adhere to that standard is clearly deserving of criticism.
and maybe being able to detect and reject USB sticks that doesn't work well...
Honestly, I don't understand this issue with USB sticks at all. This ain't the early 2000's, you know, when USB sticks were just becoming a thing. We're talking about a
20 year old technology here. The standards are well-developed and well-known. The filesystems are even older than that! The filesystem code and the USB storage driver code has been around
in open source form for about that long as well. No, at this point, there is no excuse
whatsoever for having limits on the size or formats (when the formats are one of the standards in use) of USB sticks that will work here. FAT32 as a filesystem supports volumes up to 2
terabytes, and has been around since
1996. So no, there is no excuse at all for being unable to deal with any USB stick of that size or less, save for when there's a hardware fault with the USB stick.