9.5.3 Zigbee Over The Air Update Demo

This section discusses the Zigbee Over the Air Update(OTAU).

Hardware Requirements

  • Two or more WBZ351 Curiosity boards

  • USB Cables

  • PC

Software Requirements

  • MPLABX IDE/IPE

  • MicrochipUtilityTool.exe

  • Zigbee OTAU Server and Client Image(*.hex)

  • Zigbee OTA Image(*.zigbee)

  • Terminal Emulator like TeraTerm

Procedure

  • Program, Zigbee OTA Server Image into One WBZ351 Curiosity board

  • Program, Zigbee Client Image into One or more WBZ351 Curiosity Boards

  • Connect Server and Client/Clients board with USB to PC and start TeraTerm for each board

  • Type resetToFN on every board’s Tera Term

  • Wait for network to establish. The following type of messages will appear on Tera Term

  • Device joined: Address 0xABCD MACID 0x000000000000EFBA ExtendedPANID 0x0000000000003578

  • Device joined: Address 0x1234 MACID 0x000000000000QRST ExtendedPANID 0x000000000000789A

  • Note: Numbers above are for illustration purposes only. These numbers will be different.

  • Close Server Terra Term

  • Start MicrochipUtilityTool.exe

    • Follow steps mentioned in the following picture. The demo shows two devices

  1. Click on Zigbee OTAU Tab

  2. Select Baud Rate as 115200 from the drop-down menu

  3. Select Zigbee OTA Server Serial Port from the drop-down menu

  4. Click on Connect/Disconnect

    • Click Ok on popup windows
      Figure 9-88. Figure 4: Zigbee Server Connection.

  5. Wait for connected device to appear on the device list

  6. Click on Select File from each device list and select *.zigbee file for each device(up to 5)

  7. Click on Zigbee Update button

    Figure 9-89. Figure 5: Zigbee OTAU Process Start.

Image keeps transferring frame by frame to each client node. Progress bar keep advancing. % Progress keeps advancing for selected device in the device list till all reach 100% for every selected client node. OTA Status shows OTAU Done. Tera Term connected with client shows Image Transferred Successfully and reboots after 5 sec into new Image as last command sent from Tool is reboot client devices after 5 seconds.

Figure 9-90. Figure 6: Zigbee OTAU Process Finish.

Summary

  • Maximum 5 client can be updated at a time. This limitation comes from Zigbee Server.

  • Maximum 48 bytes payload can be sent in a frame at a time

  • Out of Full packet size of 89 bytes, 39 bytes are header.

  • It takes long time to transmit all the image data to client

    • setMinimunBlockPeriod xx can be used set interpacket timing. It is recommended xx should be > 100 ms

  • The Image used for this demo has 200 ms interpacket timing. Default is set to 1000 ms interpacket timing. It takes 32 min 17 sec to transmit entire image, Image Size = 307784 bytes.

  • Once the OTAU is started, File transfer can be initiated into new nodes appeared in the device list.

  • Time out (status = 0x95) in client node is not transmitted to OTA Server.

    • A 30 second timeout has been introduced in the Tool to exit OTA process for not getting any update from the OTA server during OTA process.