How to accelerate uploading time to flash for GUI projects during development

[farukisiker]

Hello STM family,

As you know, building a project and trying it rapidly is fast enough at simulator in Touchgfx. However, we can not try every feature in simulator. So, we need to upload it to hardware. 

When pixel size is increased, binary file is also became bigger. Uploading that file on hardware takes considerable time. 

I wonder that how we can accelerate that time during development period.

Best regards,

Faruk Işıker

[TDK]

What speeds are you getting? Compare the upload time to the flash programming speed in the datasheet. If it's comparable, there's probably not much you can do to improve it. Perhaps look at the commands the IDE is using to upload code.

[farukisiker]

Assume that binary file is around 15MB. Uploading that binary by using external loader takes around 2 minutes. It is okay when development is done. But during development, when I make small changes, I need to again wait for 2 mins for debugging. So I want to reduce that time somehow.

[ferro]

Maybe try to place chunky assets at fixed addresses, flash those separately once and only flash the application code.

[Pavel A.]

As @ferro advises, and if your 15 MB binary is updated in smaller parts (only one or few files/assets) you can avoid rewriting the whole binary with a custom in-app updater that pulls the updates from the development PC, over semihosting or other interface.

Of course it will take time to make, but will serve you for your next projects.

[Osman SOYKURT]

Hello @farukisiker ,

I'm joining @ferro and @Pavel A. on the idea of updating only the area that is actually changing. If you look at our TBS, we put all our application code in internal flash but the assets are in external flash. Then in the designer, when we need to run the application on target, we can select to flash only the internal flash (if the assets haven't changed), that way we gain a lot of time in development process.

[farukisiker]

I am using flash in memory mapped mode. So, does solution cover that case as well?