We're soon going to need a better way to flash BattOrs when a new version of the BattOr firmware is released.
Right now, the only way to flash a BattOr is to do so manually (described here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_IdRUB8GKux40GsF9herpBAkktO4UjPYDzXkm5T-PI8/edit#heading=h.9rnt9mgu20f1). This worked great when we had 1 BattOr; not so well now that we have 25; and will be disastrous when we have 200.
We need to design a system that, before running a Telemetry test, checks if the latest version of the BattOr firmware is installed on the BattOr and updates the firmware if it's not before running the test. We might also want some notion of a 'canary' version of the firmware: basically say "run this version of the firmware on Chromium.Perf.Fyi so that we can make sure that it's stable, and run this other known stable version on Chromium.Perf".
One tricky thing about this is going to be that the program that we know how to use to update the firmware, avrdude, is only available on Linux and Mac hosts. We're probably going to have to find some alternative for Windows.
rnephew@, would this be something that you're interested in leading the design/implementation of? Maybe we can start w/ a design doc after I'm back from vacation next week?
Comment 1 by charliea@chromium.org
, Sep 21 2016