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Updating Optiboot & CC3000 Firmware with an Arduino

Optiboot flashing in progress

I recently purchased a CC3000 wireless board to play with on Arduinos, with an aim to use it on an Arduino Mini Pro to control some LED lighting I have. Rather than purchasing through Adafruit as I possibly should have done, it was ordered through Ebay. This turned it into a bit of a learning experience!

The Adafruit library does a firmware check to ensure it’s the most recent version that they ship, however the version I purchased from Ebay was of a lower version, and subsequently the Adafruit library would refuse to run tests. Although this could be tweaked in the code, I didn’t fancy making that change and would rather have hardware with at least a firmware version equal to or higher than the one that Adafruit use. Onwards to updating the firmware of the CC3000!

If you were following Texas Instruments guide you’d be using one of their products to do the update. With only Arduinos to hand, I ended up trying out CC3000Patch sketch from Chris Magagna.

Firstly, two things should be noted about CC3000Patch

  1. It requires almost all of your flash space
  2. It needs newlines on the serial input

The flash space isn’t really an issue until you consider that both older versions of the Arduino bootloader and older versions of Optiboot will take up too much space. I was unable to flash CC3000Patch onto an Atmega328 with Optiboot from around January 2012, so I subsequently had to look at updating Optiboot before going any further.

I was using two Mini Pros to do the programming, and although the guides don’t really cover programming these the process is broadly similar. Hook up MOSI, MISO, SCK, IRQ, Reset, Power and some status LEDs, and then flash ArduinoISP to the host Arduino *before* connecting the target Arduino. I’d also highly recommend hooking up heartbeat, error and programming status LEDs to pins 7, 8 and 9 so that you can see what’s going on. Once you’re happy with that it’s flashed ArduinoISP correctly, and the heartbeat LED is pulsing quietly, *disconnect* the DTR line between your serial adaptor and the programming Arduino. This will prevent it from autoresetting just before the upload is triggered.

Next stage, plug in the target Arduino, and run “Burn Bootloader” from the Arduino IDE (I used 1.0.5). The *target* Arduino will reset, and programming LED on the programming Arduino will light up for a minute or so. Once it goes out, all should be good.

CC3000 being flashed

Optiboot on the Mini Pro, and time to try CC3000Patch again.

First off, make sure you wire up the connections correctly. It’s wise to use the Adafruit buildtest sketch at this point to make sure you have communication with the CC3000. If the firmware version is correct, it will tell you that… if it’s incorrect, it will also tell you that 🙂 The good thing is that you have communication with the CC3000 at this point, and you can move on to updating the firmware.

The documentation for CC3000Patch is fairly good, and all you need to do is compile and upload the sketch to the Arduino, and then follow the documentation. However, if like me you use screen to communicate over serial, you’ll need to use control characters to send newlines to the Arduino before it will start listening to your commands. ^V^J (that’s Control+v, Control+j) are your friends, and you’ll be driving the text menus in no time. I believe the Arduino IDE has a similar setting somewhere in the serial monitor window, although I’ve never used that feature.

All being well the CC3000 will be quietly upgraded to v1.24 (or later), and buildtest from Adafruit_CC3000_Library will then tell you what version of firmware you have. Handy hint also… the SSID is case sensitive 🙂