WINC1500 OTA vs Driver version?

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riz-calliope
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Joined: Tue. Sep 6, 2016
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Posted by riz-calliope: Fri. Nov 16, 2018 - 07:08 PM
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Now that the winc driver seems to need to be in lockstep with the winc firmware version, how are we expected to OTA upgrade the WINC firmware?  I see that 19.6.1 is out, and there are some changes to the driver that i'd like to take advantage of - but my fleet of devices is all on 19.5.4, and I find myself in a catch-22:  if I OTA upgrade the winc firmware to 19.6.1, my samd21 firmware can't use it (because the driver is 19.5.4), and if I upgrade the driver first, I can't use the WINC1500 in order to OTA upgrade the WINC firmware!

 

I did try just ignoring the driver mismatch failure and use the 19.6.1 driver with 19.5.4 firmware, but it doesn't work.  I have not yet tried the OTA upgrade to 19.6.1 _first_, but I don't expect that to be any better.

 

Has anyone else solved this?  I mean, I suppose I could figure out a way to have both drivers compiled into one version of my firmware to perform the upgrade, but that seems like a lot of work, especially for something that worked for 19.4.4 -> 19.5.2 -> 19.5.4.

 

Thanks,

+j

 

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Wireless, 802.11/Wi-Fi
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acpie360
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Joined: Tue. Aug 16, 2016
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Posted by acpie360: Sun. Nov 18, 2018 - 06:02 PM
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If you are currently using WINC firmware 19.5.4, for example, you can OTA upgrade it to 19.6.1 and your system should run just fine. The key to this is to make sure the host driver does not go ahead of WINC firmware. In other words, if you are using host driver version 19.6.0 from the latest ASF, then the WINC firmware will have to be 19.6.1 or higher.  I have seen people started their development work based upon WINC firmware 19.5.2 or 19.5.4, however, when production started, the WINCs from a vendor were at 19.4.4. That could become a big trouble.

 

I was told that when you place an order of WINC1500 with Microchip,  you can specify which version of firmware you want, granted the lead time might be longer. The other thing you can do is to add the firmware upgrade using WINC's builtin serial interface into your manufacturing process to guarantee the WINC firmware is at the version you want.

 

My take is that unless you need some new features or particular bug fixes in the newer version of host driver, you should stay with the old one.

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