I'm trying to develop a product using the mbed lpc1768 HDK. Ultimately, it will be a custom board, deployed to customers in the field. It will act as a USB Host, reading and writing a USB flash drive. I'd like to be able to deploy any firmware updates as a file that the customer can load on the flash drive, plug into the device, and it would automatically update the firmware. Unlike the stock mbed device, I won't have another microcontroller to control the loading.

This would require it to reprogram itself using IAP. Either by copying some minimal loader code into SRAM or maybe the last on-chip flash sector and then execute from there.

Has anyone done something like this?

?

Is it possible? Yes. But I wouldn't be surprised if no one has done this before.

It's possible, but you'll need a bootloader that's capable of acting as a USB MSD Host which isn't exactly "minimal loader code", and I doubt it'll be able to run out of SRAM. You'll probably have to go the traditional route and have two binaries: a bootloader that resides in the lower region of flash, and a user application that resides in the upper region of flash. The bootloader will run on reset and either jump to the user application or, if certain conditions are met, re-program the user application from a flash drive. None of this will be possible with the online compiler, you'll need to use an offline compiler and some custom linker maps. Good luck!

Ok, thanks. I didn't want to reinvent if I didn't have to. I've done it on an LPC2212 with the Keil compiler using the two binary approach. I guess I'll need to do it again.