Wellington boot loader is a boot loader that supports loading firmware on PIC18 micro-controllers either via UART or the CAN bus.

The loader application has been written for POSIX implementations only, and for CAN bus, only with Linux SocketCAN.

For the UART interface any of a number of serial interfaces may be used which includes bluetooth devices such as the HC-05.

Wellington Boot Loader is licensed under the GPL version 3.

Wellington Boot Loader is developed by Darron M Broad with contributions from Gerhard Bertelsmann.

I am grateful to Chiculita Claudiu for his Tiny PIC Bootloader as Wellington Boot Loader uses methods derived from Tiny PIC bootloader.

I must also thank Mikael Gustavsson for his efforts with ds30 Loader. The device files are derived from ds30 Loader.

The following operations will install the loader application `easy-loader'.

hg clone http://hg.kewl.org/pub/wellington
cd wellington
make
sudo make install

Configuring Wellington is a simple case of copying a template file for the target device and editing it to suit the target application.

cd boot
cp template.asm myproject.asm
vi myproject.asm

Follow the guide given in the template to create the correct boot loader firmware for your target then build the boot loader.

make

Now you must program the boot loader onto the target device. This will depend on the programming tool you have available and in this example we use Pickle Microchip PIC ICSP.

p16 lvp program myproject.hex

Once the boot loader hex file is on the target it may be reset whereupon it will listen for a connection from `easy-loader' already installed on the host platform.

In this final step you now take the application for your target device and upload it to the boot loader which will store it in flash memory.

First install easy-loader.

hg clone http://hg.kewl.org/pub/easy-loader
cd easy-loader
make
sudo make install

Now upload application to target.

easy-loader /dev/ttyX myapp.hex

After uploading, easy-loader will instruct the Boot Loader to run the application.