Dear Reader,
I wish you a happy, healthy and successful year 2024!
For me the new year started as the old year ended: with a lot of interesting work. Since late October, I have been building an OTA update solution for a customer. I advised the customer in selecting a solution. The most interesting contenders were Mender and Memfault. The customer chose the Memfault server with an SwUpdate client. The main reasons were:
- Based on good documentation and supported by the Memfault engineers, I could quickly get the SwUpdate client working with the Memfault server. I failed with Mender.
- During the sales process, my customer and I gained some insights how other Memfault customers do OTA updates. This will help us to avoid some wrong paths. Memfault sales knew the pros and cons of their competitors’ solution. In contrast, Mender sales asked us why we would even consider OTA update solutions other than Mender.
- The above two reasons were enough for my customer to rule out Mender. The much higher costs of the Mender solution made the decision a no-brainer.
Last week, we installed my OTA update solution on their first five devices used by their developers. The solution is working reasonably well. We found some new error scenarios when updating their devices. This early and regular feedback is great and will help us eliminate more strange error scenarios long before the product release.
In this episode of the newsletter, I’ll look at OTA updates from the device or client side. In one of the next episodes, I’ll cover the server side and the requirements for a fleet management server.
Happy reading,
Burkhard
The Client Side of Over-The-Air Updates
Context
The fully electric ID.3 is VW's first car built on vw.OS. VW are facing massive software problems. They didn't even get the over-the-air (OTA) update working in time for the first batch of 10,000 cars. So, VW must update these 10,000 cars manually! Most likely, they'll have to update the second batch of 10,000 cars manually as well.
From Episode 3 of my newsletter (February 2020)
In the end, VW had to update more than 20,000 ID.3 cars. Let us assume that the update of one car takes an optimistic 15 minutes. Then, VW wasted 625 work days or more than 3 work years!