G'day everyone, Chris again from Core Electronics. Today we're looking at firmware updates for the cellular modems that come in two of the PyCom devices, that's the GPy and the FiPy both have cellular radios and a firmware must be upgraded on those and you need to change firmware is depending on whether you're using, CAT M1 or CAT NB1. Alrighty, as usual, there's a link down below for the documentation, there's far more detail there than here in the video but we'll get straight into having a look at the hardware here.

 

So, from my phone I've extracted the SIM card which we'll use at the end to make sure this entire process works, we need a micro SD card because that's the one that fits on the expansion board, so underneath your GPy or FiPy builds an SD card slot on the expansion board and I'm using an adapter today to put that onto an SD card reader, so I can connect it to the PC.

 

What I'm going to do first is just grab the micro SD card put that in an adapter and put that into the PC card reader and jump over onto the PC. The documentation I have here on the right side of the screen, I'm going to go to the core electronics website and select tutorials from the learn heading and run down to PyCom and top of the list now is GPy and FiPy Cellular LTE firmware update. Ok, now I'm going to speed through the top section of that explaining the three types of firmware’s that are here on the on the PyCom devices. The one we're doing today is just cellular radio. So, you'll need to have an Expansion Board 3, Pysense, Pytrack or Pyscan, we need to use one of those backpacks, just so that we have the SD card reader for this way to do it.

 

Alright and the first thing we need to do is to set up a micro SD card, so I'm going to hit the Windows key and type in comp and computer management comes up first on the list, we're going to use the disk management feature in Windows to with our SD card. If you come in here and you find your SD card I have here disc 1 removable, has 2 volumes on it both the volumes are NTFS, unless you've got a single volume here and unless the single volume is a fat32 one, this process won't work, so as I've done in the instructions here I'm going to show you how to remove the volumes but before I do that be very certain that you have the right device if you have a USB hard drive attached or various removable drives attached you need to be very sure that the one you're working on is the SD card, all data will be lost on the card we're going to even remove the partitions from the card and reformat it. So very big caution exclamation mark here alright. So I'm going to right-click on volume 1 I have here and delete the volume and volume 2 I'm going to delete as well, so now I'm back to having a brand-new unformatted SD card now I can right click on it create a new simple volume and as I go through the wizard, I am going to use the entire drive and assign it a letter and make sure that the file type is fat32, there we go. So very quickly the SD card becomes available, so I'm going to jump back into the instructions and find the link here going through the SD card at step 11 here download the available sequins firmware files. So, there is a firmware file here for FIPY GPY CATM1 and a firmware file here for FIPY GPY NB1, we're doing the CATM1 today, so I'm going to save that to my downloads folder and there it is. Unexpected error has occurred check the system event log so I'm just going to eject that, and I will reinsert it back into the card reader, yes, we need to format the disk, yes fat32 will do. Alright so I don't see what's happened what's gone wrong there but now we can see in computer management we have a healthy fat32 partition on that disk.

 

All right we can close computer manager and I'm going to open another Windows Explorer, so I can go to my removable disk and drag this firmware update file onto the SD card, so that's all the SD card needs to have on it and we can remove that now, don't forget to properly eject. All right so the SD card is ready, now here I am on the bench I'm going to take the SD card insert it into the expansion board and we do not need a SIM card at this point, so underneath the GPy is no SIM card so I'm just going to mount the GPy back on and plug it in there's a green flash and there should be a blue heartbeat the GPy should be happy and healthy and it is right.

 

Now we need to go to using Atom, I won't cover how to install Atom as usual there are other tutorials out there for Atom that we've done including one linked here Internet of Things with PyCom, Adafruit. So, in Atom I'm going to create a new folder and let's go to the desktop into PyCom and I'm going to call this new folder LTE, open that folder and hit select. Okay now that we're in that folder, we need to add a folder here called Lib, all the files in Lib will be uploaded to the device when we hit upload, now we need the files to put in the Lib folder. So here we have in the atom project instructions on the right-hand side, there's a link to the PyCom libraries from GitHub. So, I'll click that link that goes straight to the download file, the downloads complete, so I will extract all and I'm going fast here but all the information is in the documentation, opening PyCom libraries master, we're going into Lib SQNS upgrade and here are all the files that we want in our lib folder. So, I'm just going to drag all of those across to our project and drop them in there, right so now in Atom we can see code XCRC, SQNS upgrade, etc. we need to now make sure we have a connection to our device, if we use get serial ports it tells us com 3 is the only port so project settings should be set to com 3, save that. Alright and hopefully we get a connection on Com 3 there we go.

 

So, I've already done the hardware section, we've already got the microSD card and now we need to go through the firmware upgrade process. So, I'm skipping down to step 7 here the command we want I will copy and paste, so I don't make a spelling mistake import SQNS upgrade, that's a library that we've added in the library folder and that should not have worked because I haven't uploaded yet, it's probably just worked because I was testing in a moment ago. All right, now we have uploaded, let's do that again, import SQNS upgrade and this is the main function here. All right so we're running from the SQNS upgrade library, we do a run and we give it the path to the file on the SD card that we downloaded, and we give it a serial port speed, the serial port I'm assuming is between the ESP 32 processor and the sequence modem. Now there will be lots of printouts here and the most important thing does not power off, don't freak out and unplug it for any reason, if something goes wrong we need to seriously think about what's going on before we do any actions. So, I'm going to start this process welcome to the firmware process, resetting, starting STP, do not disconnect power, all right so we're 1%, this can take up to four minutes to run, if it runs beyond five I think we're in trouble.

 

If you look at the documentation on the right-hand side of the screen down at the bottom I've put in a section here on errors and failures. There's a few things that can go wrong just through basic errors like you know fat fingering the name of a file, something like that, at the top here you see what happens if I haven't uploaded first before I try these commands, the second one I've put the incorrect name of the file in and it just fails. Now at the bottom I have a brief description on the problem I had with the FiPy and what I've done is created a post on the PyCom forums to explain what I did and it's probably an example to you of when you get stuck on PyCom products with a problem, this is a very good place to go and if you can put in as much detail as you can. So, I've tried very hard to at the top say exactly what I'm trying to fix, the LTE on my FiPy and doesn't work how do I recover it. How do I know it doesn't work well when I try to say LTE equals LTE in one of my Python programs, nothing happens after that it's frozen. If I try to go through an upgrade this is what happened the first time, it got to the resetting I do not disconnect power and it stayed there for about five minutes. After five minutes after doing some reading on the forums, I pressed ctrl C to cancel that might have been the wrong thing to do but you can see here I did a keyboard interrupt. All right and if I retry the upgrade as we're doing right now the problem I was getting was this 8T SMSWBOOT failed, which I think is the system management software boot, I then realized that my firmware was not up-to-date so I did a firmware update and then tried the process again and then looking into the SQNS upgrade.python file, I made a little script to just communicate to the cellular modem the most basic thing I could possibly say just to send it a reset command and I couldn't get a response from that. So, I'm looking forward to some feedback from PyCom on what I've done there, a worst-case scenario is I think I might have damaged it and I must send it back.

 

All right so our process is going well we're at 79%, again it's going to do several reboots, the way I understand this works is that there are two slots for firmware on these modems and new firmware he's added into an empty slot and then the device restarts, checks that the new firmware is okay, then it selects that as the current firmware and then restarts with that one. So, it's almost done and once we've done that I will probably grab the SIM card from my phone and find my previous project, which was the GPy project, I'll have this one ready to go. So here we are its resetting do not disconnect the power, the reset looks okay, deploying the upgrade, resetting again, upgrade complete and then we go right at the bottom, we've got the triple chevron, I call it the three greater than signs. So, the process is finished the program has stopped we can't damage it now by unplugging anything. So, I'm just going to disconnect this project from the device and come back over here unplug it, going to take the GPy off the expansion board, just to make it easier to put the SIM card in, that needs to be done the right way up, don't need the microSD card anymore, we'll take that out as we go. Alright so, with Sim card on, an SD card off, I'll now switch to my previous project, right here we are this is my previous project and we get the Com port to connect, disconnect and reconnect.

 

Alright so as I did this was the getting started code for the GPy and we're just going to run it, it will set the internal clock and print the date and time, so we'll run this guy resetting the modem, configuring the modem, attaching, connecting, updating, there we go, so we have complete success. So, we've done there a firmware update on the GPy, so we have selected the CAT M1 firmware for that device, updated it from a micro SD card and now having added a micro Sim that we've already proved works, we can see that the getting started code for the GPy project runs just fine.

 

Alrighty, so if you've got firmware updates to do on your devices hopefully this is a big help to you, there'll be a future update to show what happens with the FiPy that had a failed firmware update. So, thank you for watching.