Panda2 Remote Deployment / Updating

NETMF & Gadgeteer
1

Hello all.

Here’s a fairly obnoxious use case but relevant to me :slight_smile:

My reading of the SystemUpdate class documentation has me lead to believe this is just impossible to accomplish; but alas I’m posting here anyway hoping I’m very wrong!

Computer:
VisualStudio Express, all setup with NETMF and GHI SDK.
not Attached to a Panda2.
Attached to a USB XBee serial adapter

Device:
Battery powered Panda2 (reset buttons accessible and can be pressed by user)
Also has XBee serial module.
SD Card installed.

Desired process:
Code and compile on Computer.
Transfer Main Application update image to Device via XBee and store on Device’s SD Card (transfer protocol is easy)
Update Device with image.

My problem:
It seems the only way to acquire an image is to compile it and deploy it to a device attached by USB… and then extract the image from the device. Is there any other method?
Is a virtual machine possible here? Having a second Panda2 just for compiling isn’t really an option for us at the moment.

Thanks for any assistance :slight_smile:
–Mitch

2

have you tried the emulator… not sure if you can extract the hex from there…

3

“Build” is F6. No need to “Build and deploy”. I think the resulting PDB file is what you need.

Then you need to take that app and deploy it. So you need a way of sending to the remote SD card (ie your app needs to handle that) and then you need to use the GHI IFU to apply the update.

Skewworks Pyxis2 is the best sample reference for IFU, but I am not sure it’s “Panda Ready”.

There has also been other people using XBEE for debugging which is basically the same as any other serial debug, so that might be another way to look at your problem.

4

I also want to know if there is a way to get HEX file without deploy to device and then extract from there.

Maybe you can load DLL directly from SD card. Here is an example:
GHI Electronics – Where Hardware Meets Software.
I never tried it, but it is worth to give it a shot.