How to set boot partition when writing to flash?

[trullock]

My device has a factory app partition and two OTA partitions. My partition table looks like this:

# Name,   Type, SubType, Offset,  Size, Flags
nvs,      data, nvs,     0x9000,  0x5000,
otadata,  data, ota,     0xe000,  0x2000,
factory,  app,  factory, 0x10000, 0x200000,
app0,     app,  ota_0,   0x210000,0x200000,
app1,     app,  ota_1,   0x410000,0x200000,
spiffs,   data, spiffs,  0x620000,0x4E0000,
coredump, data, coredump,0xFF0000,0x10000,

Repeatedly flashing new firmware versions works fine:

"C:\.platformio\penv\Scripts\python.exe" "C:\.platformio\packages\tool-esptoolpy\esptool.py" --chip esp32 --port "COM10" --baud 460800 --before default_reset --after hard_reset write_flash -z --flash_mode dio --flash_freq 40m --flash_size 16MB 0x1000 bootloader.bin 0x8000 partitions.bin 0xe000 boot_app0.bin 0x10000 firmware.bin

When I use in-app functionality to upload a new firmware OTA and set the boot partition using esp_ota_set_boot_partition this works fine.

Repeated successive OTA updates also work fine, switching back and forth between ota_0 and ota_1.

If however I then flash a new version via UART using the esptool.py, the flash appears to succeed but the active boot partition isn't updated, meaning it boots back to the latest OTA partition.

What can I do about this?

My expectation would be that esptool.py sets the active boot partition to whereever you're flashing to. For backwards compat I suppose this can be off by default, but regarless, a switch to control this or other command would be great.

Thanks

[Jason2866]

esptool.py does not set anything regarding boot partitions.

[trullock]

@Jason2866 so is there a way to set the active partition from the CLI?

[Jason2866]

Not an existing easy way. You have to read and modify the otadata partition
See https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-guides/partition-tables.html
"The bootloader consults this data in order to know which app to execute. If "ota data" is empty, it will execute the factory app."

Edit: There is a Python tool https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-reference/system/ota.html#python-api

https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/blob/master/components/app_update/otatool.py

Should be possible to embed into Platformio

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