OTA (Over-the-air) updates planned for release?

[kyleSpaulus]

Hi,

Is there planned official support for over the air updates (OTA) for the esp-hal project?

I found some independent resources, has someone used them with success?

https://docs.rs/esp-hal-ota/latest/esp_hal_ota/index.html
https://docs.rs/esp-ota-nostd/latest/esp_ota_nostd/

//Kyle

[bjoernQ]

We some support in esp-bootloader-esp-idf (since it's highly dependent on the bootloader used)

We also have an example: https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-hal/blob/main/examples/src/bin/ota_update.rs

It's a bit more low-level than the mentioned crates but something can be built upon that

[kyleSpaulus]

Hi Bjoern,

Oh! I didn't know that. Thank you for the info and the link to the example. Will give it a go :)

//Kyle

[yanshay]

I am using esp-hal-ota and it's working well.
The only thing worth mentioning (not related to which ota you plan to use) is that tuning esp-WiFi is important to get fast download. Defaults (as of 0.23.1) were not very good in my tests back then and I was able to get much higher transfer rates by tuning these.

[kyleSpaulus]

Hi yanshay,

Sounds promising, thank you for the feedback. I will return to this package when testing this functionality.

Have you tried the ota update example as Bjoern mentioned?

I find OTA essential for my use case

[yanshay]

I didn't, I don't think it was in esp-hal repo when I needed it.
I think I did see an example on Bjoren personal GitHub account back then, just this one came packaged so was easier to try and it worked so stayed with it (btw - Bjoren personal GitHub account has also other useful stuff to learn from when it comes to esp-hal development).

[AnthonyGrondin]

You could share your tuning experiments and values to help the community finding out the best tuning for their projects. There used to be a tuning guide but I think it got lost in some refactor.

Overall, real test-cases and experiences would be helpful for those who would try tweaking their values.

[yanshay]

I don't have the details of the experiments but I can share the parameters I modified and use currently.
These were optimized for the use case of OTA downloading while flashing, so I wanted to reduce as much as possible the networking overhead over the minimal flashing time required. It made a significant difference.

ESP_WIFI_CONFIG_RX_QUEUE_SIZE="6"
ESP_WIFI_CONFIG_MAX_BURST_SIZE="12"

It was on an old version, I'm currently still using 0.23.1 .

I don't remember why I didn't choose to increase these values more (like RX QUEUE SIZE) maybe it had memory costs and I always struggle with memory so maybe I increased until I noticed the improvement is marginal.

I still notice that WiFi performance has large influence on the download speed (like where I place the board). It could double the time even though the speed is way lower than what I would get on standard laptop in the same spot doing the same download.