User guide

2
Atmel AVR2054
8390B-AVR-12/11
1 Overview
The serial bootloader allows loading of firmware images to devices from a PC
application over the serial connection. It is intended for use with Atmel
®
wireless
stacks, such as IEEE
®
802.15.4 MAC, RF4CE, BitCloud
®
and BitCloud Profile Suite,
but can also be used with non-wireless applications.
An application image is received and written to the flash by embedded bootloader,
which must be programmed to the devices beforehand. The package contains pre-
compiled images of the embedded bootloader application for a wide set of
configurations as well as its source code with projects files for different toolchains.
The embedded bootloader application can be built using Atmel AVR Studio
®
5, IAR
Embedded Workbench
®
, or the command line. To enable this, the package provides
AVR Studio 5 project files, IAR™ project files, and makefiles.
A firmware image should be in the Motorola S-record hexadecimal format (SREC)
and may be transferred to a device programmed with the embedded bootloader by a
special host application. The host may be a PC or another MCU and should be
connected to the device via a serial interface as shown in Figure 1-1.
The pa
ckage provides the Bootloader PC tool for a PC to act as a bootloader host.
The tool comes as a GUI application and a command line tool and is used to load
firmware images through the serial connection to devices pre-programmed with the
embedded bootloader.
Figure 1-1. General approach for using bootloader to program a device.
The Bootloader PC tool may also be used to initiate an Over-the-Air upgrade (OTAU)
of a ZigBee
®
network by transferring a firmware image to the OTAU server device
connected to the PC via a serial interface. See [3] for
more detail.
1.1 Supported platforms
Embedded bootloader is supported on a set of Atmel microcontrollers and
development boards shown in Table 1-1.
Note that embedded bootloader can work
with different serial interfaces. Supported serial interfaces are specified in the
Makefile of the embedded bootloader application at compile time (see Section 2.1).