4 Firmware

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4.1 Field Upgrades

Upgrade Philosophy

The Aardvark adapter is designed so that its internal firmware can be upgraded by the user, thereby allowing the inclusion of any performance enhancements or critical fixes available after the purchase of the device. The upgrade procedure is performed via USB and has several error checking facilities to ensure that the Aardvark adapter is not rendered permanently unusable by a bad firmware update. In the worst case scenario, a corruption can cause the Aardvark adapter to be locked until a subsequent clean update is executed.

The upgrade utility is also compatible with older devices that use the legacy virtual serial port communications drivers (pre-3.00 firmware revisions). The older serial port driver must be installed on your operating system. When listing such devices, the upgrade utility will report these devices with port numbers starting at 128. The devices will also be marked as “serial” as opposed to the “direct” identifier. Upgrading the legacy firmware will cause the Aardvark unit to automatically switch to using the new communications driver interface. If the host PC does not have the appropriate driver installed, the operating system may prompt the user for the new driver upon completion of the firmware upgrade. Please refer to the section on USB driver installation above for more information on how to install the new driver.

Upgrade Procedure

Here is the simple procedure by which the Aardvark firmware is upgraded.

1. Download the latest firmware from the Total Phase website.

2. Unzip the downloaded file. It should contain the aaflash utility. This utility contains the necessary information to perform the entire firmware update.

3. Run aaflash (aaflash-win32.exe on Windows, aaflash-linux on Linux, aaflash-darwin on Mac OS X). It will first display the firmware version contained in the utility along with the required hardware version to run this firmware version.

4. It will list all of the detected devices along with their current firmware and hardware versions.

5. Select a device to upgrade. Note the firmware and hardware version of the device before proceeding. If the selected device’s hardware is not suitable to accept the new firmware, an error will be printed and the utility will be reinvoked.

6. If the chosen device is acceptable, the aaflash utility will update the device with the new firmware. The process should take about 3 seconds, with a progress bar displayed during the procedure.

7. The upgraded Aardvark adapter should now be usable by any Aardvark-enabled application.

8. In the event that there was a malfunction in the firmware update, the Aardvark adapter may not be recognizable by an Aardvark-enabled application. Try the update again, since the Aardvark adapter has most likely become locked due to a corruption in the upgrade process. If the update still does not take effect, it is best to revert back to the previous firmware. This can be done by running a previous version of aaflash that contains an earlier firmware version. Check the Total Phase website or the distribution CD that was included with your Aardvark adapter for previous versions of the firmware.