Robust OTA Updates For Linux Devices, the Easy Way

This guide will walk you through all the steps necessary to build a bespoke variant of Debian with over-the-air update support, including delta updates, integrated with Memfault. Following this guide, you will also install a full system update via Memfault to your custom system running in a VM or on a Raspberry Pi. To follow this guide you only need a working Docker installation on either Linux or macOS. End-to-end this guide should take less than 30 minutes to complete, so let’s get started.

Updating NVIDIA Jetson devices with Memfault OTA

NVIDIA offers one of the most comprehensive SDKs for developers of AI-heavy products. It includes a development kit that can emulate other devices in the lineup (Jetson AGX Orin DK), a simpler development kit for “entry-level” products (Jetson Orin Nano DK), a ton of exciting software libraries, AI models and even more examples of how to use them. It’s truly outstanding and out of the box shows up as a Ubuntu workstation which will feel very familiar.

However, it can be a bit daunting to figure out how to take this workstation experience and turn it into a headless unit that you can ship to customers far away and update remotely.

OTA for Embedded Linux Devices: A practical introduction

A core belief of Memfault is that we can ship faster when we have good infrastructure in place. An essential piece of this infrastructure is tools to send firmware updates over the air. It enables the team to ship more often and spend more time building features.

In this article, we look specifically at what is required to ship over-the-air firmware updates for Linux systems.

Saving bandwidth with delta firmware updates

In this post, we introduce the concept of delta (i.e. partial) firmware updates, explain why you may want to implement them in your projects and go through an example implementation from top to bottom.

Device Firmware Update Cookbook

In this post, I share the device firmware update architecture I would implement knowing everything I know now. I also highlight a few design patterns that are particularly useful. The example comes with a fully functional example of a multi-stage bootloader with DFU functionality.