8 years, 6 months ago.

Authoritative definition of .bin file format (mbed K64F)

About a month ago I stumbled on a diagram of the .bin file format generated by mbed. Alas, I didn't bookmark nor save it. Is there an app note, PDF, manual, that contains it? I cannot seem to find it again.

Specifically I am using the K64F on my own PCB and we are trying to implement a firmware update over TCP/IP. And no, I am not going to use someone else's web-based implementation or libraries. It's easy enough to implement if I can find the supporting Freescale documentation.

In general, is there a way to search for information in a documents repository rather than the community?

1 Answer

8 years, 6 months ago.

Bin file is really easy: It is a one on one copy of what is placed in the flash. There are no special bytes, no length field, no CRC bytes, etc. Copy it one on one to the flash memory and you are done.

Something which might be a useful reference for you: https://developer.mbed.org/users/Sissors/code/Bootloader_K64F/. Thats a Serial bootloader I wrote for the K64F: It also just copies the bin files onto the flash memory.

Accepted Answer

Thanks Erik, I'll experiment with your bootloader.

I guess i'm asking the wrong question then. Maybe it has more to do with the RTOS and executing main() or finding an entry point (0xA0000 sounds familiar). I vaguely remember a file containing a header with offsets to executable code. We were experimenting with an interactive debugger that allowed us to dump memory, peek, poke registers, and execute code out of RAM etc. We can't find that either. It was for the FRDM-K64 board which we are using as a pod.

posted by Zachary Polikarpus 02 Nov 2015