What FreeRTOS Boards are fully supported for OTA updates?

Question

I’m aware of the supported devices for FreeRTOS [here](https://freertos.org/RTOS_ports.html?_ga=2.165111679.1380880367.1658266296-1765742849.1658253566), but I’m wondering if all of these also fully support OTA updates with AWS IoT OTA feature. I am specifically asking if these devices would fully work with OTA updates out of the box if they simply have FreeRTOS installed.

I’m asking because I have learned that certain FOTA solutions from other companies claim to support their entire RTOS, yet only works on a select few devices because each device needs an additional “flashing driver” that actually takes the received update and flashes it to the device’s custom memory. These drivers are custom to each specific board within broader families of MCUs. So I am wondering if all FreeRTOS supported MCUs have this capability to flash to the specific device's memory, or if it is only supported on a subset of chips?

For example, looking at demos, I only see OTA examples for ESP32 MCU, but are there any other examples, or is OTA only supported on these?

Answer

Hi. You are correct that there's a distinction between the FreeRTOS kernel having been ported to a certain processor, and a reference implementation of AWS IoT OTA being available for that processor. The link you've pointed to is referring specifically to just ports of the kernel. Only a subset of these have an OTA reference implementation.

Implementations of AWS IoT OTA will usually also make use of the optional [FreeRTOS for AWS IoT](https://freertos.org/iot-libraries.html) libraries and specifically the [AWS IoT OTA](https://freertos.org/ota/index.html) library. As part of porting the OTA library to a particular device, a developer needs to supply a [Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL)](https://freertos.org/Documentation/api-ref/ota-for-aws-iot-embedded-sdk/docs/doxygen/output/html/ota_pal_interface.html) to integrate the OTA library with the underlying hardware. This is probably what you meant by "flashing driver".

The [amazon-freertos](https://github.com/aws/amazon-freertos) repository contains references implementations and demos of FreeRTOS and the FreeRTOS for AWS IoT libraries for a variety of boards and processors. Some of these implementations support OTA. One way to tell is to check for the existence of an OTA PAL implementation for a particular vendor and board. For example:

- https://github.com/aws/amazon-freertos/tree/main/vendors/espressif/boards/ports/ota_pal_for_aws
- https://github.com/aws/amazon-freertos/tree/main/vendors/ti/boards/cc3220_launchpad/ports/ota_pal_for_aws
- https://github.com/aws/amazon-freertos/tree/main/vendors/nordic/boards/nrf52840-dk/ports/ota_pal_for_aws

More information here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/dev-guide-ota-workflow.html

Additionally, some vendors have their own AWS IoT OTA implementations for various MCUs and boards. ST offer an X-CUBE-AWS expansion package for several of their IoT Discovery kits. For example: https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/embedded-software/mcu-mpu-embedded-software/stm32-embedded-software/stm32cube-expansion-packages/x-cube-aws.html

What FreeRTOS Boards are fully supported for OTA updates?

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