With this in mind, in this exercise we will learn how to update the firmware of an nRF9160 DK or nRF91x1 DK over a cellular connection (LTE-M or NB-IoT). MCUboot and the swapping of firmware is the same here as we learned in the theory part of this section, so all we need to do is move the new firmware to the mcuboot_secondary slot in the flash memory of the nRF91 Series.
We will split the “travel” of the firmware package into two steps:
Download firmware into the mcuboot_secondary slot
Hosting the firmware in the cloud
Download firmware into the mcuboot_secondary slot
The nRF Connect SDK FOTA Download library is used to download firmware from a URL. If this update is an MCUboot update, it will automatically be downloaded into the mcuboot_secondary slot. After the download is complete, it is automatically tagged as “test” by the library.
The FOTA Download library may be called directly from our application. However, several of the cloud libraries in the nRF Connect SDK has FOTA support built-in where FOTA Download is called automatically from the cloud library. See specific documentation for each cloud library for how they handle FOTA.
Hosting the firmware in the cloud
To download the firmware to the device, we must have uploaded the firmware somewhere. As with the previous exercises, we will use build/<project>/zephyr/<project>.signed.bin as our new firmware image. The FOTA Download library does not really care where this file is, as long as it has an URL and a filename. Because of this, it is possible to upload <project>.signed.bin to a public page and download it directly from this page, as done by our HTTP Update sample.
However, this solution does not scale very well. With multiple different devices connected to the internet, we want a way to get an overview over our devices and a way to push updates to subsets of the devices. The different cloud providers have FOTA solutions which give us such functionality. Because of this, we will learn how to use the Device Management in nRF Cloud to host our FOTA firmware updates in this exercise. Other cloud providers will have similar functionality.
Exercise steps
Create a new application in the nRF Connect for VS Code extension, select Copy a sample, and search for nRF Cloud MQTT FOTA
1. Build the application and flash it to your board.
Build the sample for nrf9160dk_nrf9160_ns, nrf9161dk_nrf9161_ns or nrf9151dk_nrf9151_ns and flash it to the board. Observe that the sample successfully connects to nRF Cloud from the logs.
Important
The nRF9160 SoC supports IMEI-based client ID when connecting to the nRF Cloud. By default the nRF Cloud FOTA example uses internal UUID.
When using nRF9160DK board set CONFIG_NRF_CLOUD_CLIENT_ID_SRC_INTERNAL_UUID=n in the prj.conf.
4.1 First, we will have to add the nRF91 Series device to a group in the nRF Cloud. Since the device has already been provisioned to nRF Cloud, we should see it in the Devices tab:
4.2 Next up, we will add a new firmware bundle containing the firmware we will upload. Go to Device Management → Firmware Updates and select the “Add Bundle” button under Bundles:
In the following Create Update Bundle window, upload build/dfu_application.zip. This file is an automatically created zip containing DFU files such as nrf_cloud_mqtt_fota.signed.bin. nRF Cloud will have logic unzip dfu_application.zip, read the manifest and then FOTA the correct files to the nRF91.
Then fill out the rest of the fields. We can choose what we want for the name and version, but it is a good idea to make something that makes sense and that we can increment later.
4.3 We will now create an update. For this, we use the “Create FOTA Update” button at the top of the Firmware Updates page:
In the Create Update window, we fill in a name and description for the update. Then we choose the bundle that we just created and finally choose our DK:
Leave “Deploy now” unchecked and press “Create Update”.
4.4 Connect the nRF Terminal to the nRF91 device so we can watch the logs when the update starts.
4.5 After step 4.3, we get to a page for the Update:
Next up, we can deploy the update by pressing the “large “Deploy Update” button. Then we wait a little, and we should be able to see all device queued for the update:
When the update has been deployed, nRF Cloud will publish an MQTT message to the device to tell it to start the download. Then all we have to do is wait, and the update should happen automatically. You can see that the update happens both in the status bar at nRF Cloud and in the logs from the nRF91 device.
4.6 When the update is finished, we can see the following logs:
As we can see, we must restart the device to apply the update. Reset the nRF91 Series DK and observe the swap. The nRF Cloud library will then see that it has a pending update again, but when it realizes that its update is already completed, it will confirm the update so as not to swap back on its next reboot.
With this, we have successfully updated the nRF91 Series DK application with FOTA. We can confirm that by selecting our device in “Device Management -> Devices” page.
5. Update the modem firmware over FOTA.
5.1 First, we check the current modem firmware version. To do this in nRF Cloud, we select the device from the Devices menu:
Then we can find the modem version information under Device Info:
5.2 If the device needs updating, add a modem firmware update and deploy it, as we did in step 4.3.
This time, we won’t upload the dfu file. Please choose the MFW delta update file that fits your current modem firmware version and the target version you want to upgrade to.
5.3 As with the application update, an MQTT message should be received by the nRF91 Series device, automatically starting the modem delta update.
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•Support for nRF54LS05 DK (Available through the early access sampling program) •Support for the nRF54LM20B with Axon NPU for Edge AI applications
Bluetooth LE updates
•Quality of Service module is now production-ready. •New experimental features for RF testing (Direct Test Mode) and low-latency packet handling (LE Flushable ACL).
MCUboot & Partition Manager
•Single-Slot DFU and RAM Load mode are both promoted to fully supported •Partition Manager is officially deprecated in favor of Zephyr's devicetree-based partitioning.
