Interact with a Microchip Harmony bootloader running on a target microcontroller via USB HID.

Microchip's MPLAB / Harmony3 provides a drop-in bootloader module for MPLAB.X project. hid_bootloader is a Python module that allows you to interact with the bootloader and hexfiles from the command line. Written in Python, it should work on Windows, Linux and macOS host platforms.

hid_bootloader recognizes the following commands:

$ hid_bootloader/bl_main.py bootload -x <hex_file>
   [--vid <vid>] [--pid <pid>] [--verbose] [--trace]

Download hexfile into the target program memory.

$ hid_bootloader/bl_main.py crc_memory [-x <hex_file>]
   [-s <start_addr>] [-e <end_addr>] [--verbose] [--trace]

Compute CRC16 over the target program memory. If either start_addr or end_addr are omitted, they will be filled in by parsing hex_file.

$ hid_bootloader/bl_main.py crc_hexfile -x <hex_file> [--verbose] [--trace]

Compute CRC16 over the given hexfile.

$ hid_bootloader/bl_main.py crc_memory -x <hex_file> [--verbose] [--trace]

Compute and print CRC16 on the target memory and CRC16 on the hexfile.

$ hid_bootloader/bl_main.py run_program [--verbose] [--trace]

Jump to the program resident in program memory. Does not return to the bootloader.

The hid_bootloader commands listed above call upon underlying Harmony Bootloader commands. This section describes the low-level Harmony Bootloader commands.

When in bootloader mode, the target microcontroller listens for the following commands:

Requests bootload version. Host sends request: [READ_BOOT_INFO] Target sends response: [READ_BOOT_INFO, <version_lo>, <version_hi>].

Erases all program memory (except for the bootloader itself). Host sends request: [ERASE_FLASH] Target sends response: [ERASE_FLASH].

Program one record of hex data. Note that the program memory must have been previously erase with an ERASE_FLASH command.

Host sends request: [PROGRAM_FLASH hex_data...] where hex_data is one line from a file in Intel Hex format, where each pair of hex digits has been converted into a single byte. Target sends response: [PROGRAM_FLASH].

Calculate the CRC over a range of bytes in program memory.

Host sends [READ_CRC start_addr byte_count]. Target sends response [READ_CRC, crc_lo, crc_hi].

Exit the bootloader and start the target application.

Host sends [JMP_TO_APP]. Target does not respond.