- Thu Oct 08, 2015 10:31 am
#30886
rant wrote:Is there a way to flash the latest sdk for AT commands, using ONE file (.bin) ?
While it is true that a combined download image can be built, a different one would be required for each of the different Flash sizes available. The standard ESP-01 has a 512K byte Flash chip but there are other ESP devices with 2MB, 4MB and even larger Flash chips. The reason that a different combined image is require is that the "system parameter area" (which contains configuration information) is always located 16K bytes from the
end of the Flash chip.
There are several ESP Flash utilities available and some of them have the ability to create a combined image incorporating several image files. In most cases, the combined image has filler bytes (often 0xff) to represent the space between the constituent images. Depending on the size of the Flash chip and the offsets of the constituent images, the padded combined file can be quite large and can therefore take a long time to download to the device.
My
esp_tool utility has the ability to construct sparse combined image files as well as padded combined image files. A sparse combined image file does not contain padding bytes and is therefore smaller and faster to download to the device. This is possible because the structure of a sparse combined image file represents the space between constituent images numerically rather than physically.