over-the-air update

3 Articles

OTA ESP32 GUI Makes Updates Simple

June 23, 2020 by 18 Comments

One of the disadvantages of having cheap WiFi-capable boards like those based on the ESP32 is that you have to update them. If you have even a few in every room of your house, it can be a pain to pull them out and connect them to a cable for programming. Over the air programming is a great answer, and [Kevin] shows how you can control the update via a simple GUI. You can see a video demonstration of how it works below.

[Kevin] uses a ready-made OTA library to do the work, but creates a GUI configuration and downloader tool. There is a manual step to force the board into the OTA mode, which might be a mild inconvenience, but it improves security since you need physical access to the device to do an update.

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Hijacking The Sonoff OTA Mechanism

May 31, 2017 by 25 Comments

ITEAD’s Sonoff line is a range of Internet-of-Things devices based around the ESP8266. This makes them popular for hacking due to their accessibility. Past projects have figured out how to reflash the Sonoff devices, but for [mirko], that wasn’t enough – it was time to reverse engineer the Sonoff Over-The-Air update protocol.

[mirko]’s motivation is simple enough – a desire for IoT devices that don’t need to phone home to the corporate mothership, combined with wanting to avoid the labor of cracking open every Sonoff device to reflash it with wires like a Neanderthal. The first step involved connecting the Sonoff device to WiFi and capturing the traffic. This quickly turned up an SSL connection to a remote URL. This was easily intercepted as the device doesn’t do any certificate validation – but a lack of security is sadly never a surprise on the Internet of Things.

After capturing the network traffic, [mirko] set about piecing together the protocol used to execute the OTA updates. After a basic handshake between client and server, the server can ask the client to take various actions – such as downloading an updated firmware image.  After determining the messaging format, [mirko] sought to create a webserver in Python to replicate this behaviour.

There are some pitfalls – firmware images need to be formatted slightly differently for OTA updates versus the usual serial upload method, as this process leaves the stock bootloader intact. There’s also the split-partition flash storage system to deal with, which [mirko] is still working on.

Nevertheless, it’s great to see hackers doing what they do best – taking control over hardware and software to serve their own purposes. To learn more, why not check out how to flash your Sonoff devices over serial? They’re just an ESP8266 inside, after all.

Continuous Delivery For Your ESP8266

June 8, 2016 by 5 Comments

There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a problem we all have. You change your code a lot — you can’t help it, you just need to tweak one last little bit. And then you have to go downstairs, fetch your ESP8266 module, plug it in to your computer, flash the new firmware in, and then run back down and re-install your wine-cellar temperature monitor. If only there were a way to continuously update your ESP8266 over the air, pulling new code down from your GitHub repository, automatically running your test suite on it, and then pushing it off to the ESP.

OK, it’s ridiculous overkill, but [squix] strung together a bunch of open-source continuous integration tools and made them work with the ESP8266. A simple PHP script connects the ESP to the rest of the web infrastructure.

[squix] says the word “security” in the same way that gin aficionados whisper “vermouth” over their Martinis. Which is to say, there is none. But for a home solution, or if you want to play around with continuous development, it’s a good start.

And this is a cool project because it makes use of the ESP8266 OTA (over-the-air) programming library to push the code across. And we do hate having to run around the house to update firmware.

So check it out if you want to push code to your ESP8266s without physically going to fetch them, or if you want to integrate your web development with your home deployment.