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Flashing an LPC176x or STM32 board using Binary File Transfer

Binary File ransfer is an alternative method to transfer the firmware.bin file to a printer that can be flashed from the SD card.

WARNING: This feature is based on the experimental Marlin Binary File Transfer Protocol. It works well, but the protocol will undergo changes before it goes final, which will break it. When that happens I will update the plugin, but it may not happen immediately.

Table of Contents

  1. Warnings and Caveats
  2. Installation
    1. Marlin Binary Protocol Package
  3. Marlin Configuration
  4. Plugin Configuration
    1. Required Settings
    2. Optional Settings

Warnings and Caveats

  1. The binary file transfer protocol is still work in progress

    While the current implementation works, it will change, and these changes will break the current version. As much as possible, I will try to support the current implementation and the final version, but my ability to do so may be limited due to dependencies on other libraries.

    If it comes to a choice, the final version will be the one which is supported.

  2. Your Raspberry Pi may crash, but it's not my fault

    While developing this I came across what seems to be a bug in the Raspberry Pi kernel, where it will sometimes panic (crash) when the printer board resets. To mitigate this, as of Feb 6th 2021, a 2s delay has been added to the LPC M997 reset routine which appears to stop the crash from happening. You will need to be running Marlin from the bugfix-2.0.x branch, after https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin/commit/004bed8a7fc3ff9feb73a0ea9794635b50073c27 to have the fix.

    On my test system, with the old reset code, I would easily crash my Pi anywhere between 1-25 resets. After the change I have flashed the board dozens of times and reset it 500+ times without crashing it.

    That said, the underlying bug still exists, so you may still experience your Pi crashing when the board resets. Caveat emptor.

Installation

Marlin Binary Protocol Package

The plugin currently uses the marlin-binary-protocol package to implement the transfer protocol. This package has dependencies on heatshrink, which is hard to install automatically due to compatibility issues with Python 2 and Python 3. For this reason the marlin-binary-protocol package and the heatshrink dependency need to be installed manually using pip.

NB: If you are running OctoPrint in a VirtualEnv (as recommended) you need to run the appropriate pip commands below inside that environment. For OctoPi users, this is ~/oprint/bin/pip anywhere it says pip.

Depending on your system, the command you use to restart OctoPrint may also be different.

Python 2

  1. Install marlin-binary-protocol - the dependencies just work

    pip install marlin-binary-protocol

  2. Restart OctoPrint

    sudo service octoprint restart

Python 3

  1. Install a Python 3 compatible version of heatshrink to satisfy marlin-binary-protocol

    pip3 install https://github.com/p3p/pyheatshrink/releases/download/0.3.3/pyheatshrink-pip.zip

  2. Install marlin-binary-protocol

    pip3 install marlin-binary-protocol

  3. Restart OctoPrint

    sudo service octoprint restart

Marlin Configuration

The line following line must be uncommented in Configuration_adv.h:

#define BINARY_FILE_TRANSFER

Plugin Configuration

Firmware Updater

Required Settings

There are no required settings.

Optional Settings

Option Description
Wait after connect Some boards reset after getting the command to start binary transfer mode. A value of 3 seconds is normal for when this wait is required. Default is 0.
Communication timeout Protocol communication timeout. Default is 1000ms.
Verbose progress logging Log verbose transfer progress to the OctoPrint log file