Control-F is a wonderful thing. RHB is a WHO, not a WHAT. His is the post just above yours.
![Wink ;)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
What really boggles imagination is that everything they've built up to this point needed a firmware upload at the factory in CHINA: no soft update. Dudes, REALLY?
Around about 1990 a team of 3 people made a breakthrough emulator for a microcontroller... it was TINY compared to the other beasts on the market, around the size of a bar of soap. One of the initial design considerations was 'soft updates', so we figured out how to make that work. We had twice the Flash capacity that the firmware + FPGA needed so that we could fall back gracefully in case of a corrupted upload. Overkill, but still handy. We pretty much invented the whole 'soft update' thing from scratch 'cos nobody had documented such a thing, other than a few hints in EDN and Embedded Systems Programming mags. One of the first units went to the Philips apps engineer, and he found a bug the first week. He described an error that had to be in the FPGA. I pulled up the schematic, saw that I'd forgotten to invert one unusual state of one pin, and I told him I'd call him back. I recompiled the FPGA, uploaded it and tested it, and it was good. The hardest thing long ago was getting the update file to him. I had to FTP it to a server Philips had (using my X.25 dialup account - not much Internet in 1990) as the hex file was too big for my neolithic email. ~30 minutes after the 'customer' called with a problem, he had the fix in hand and was off working again. Even though I'd screwed up, it proved that 'soft update' was great for keeping the customers happy.
28 years later, Feeltech is
just now figuring out that 'soft update' is a Good Thing. Jeebus Crisco, I feel like half of my life has been an utter waste.