An increasing number of CANopen devices need bootloaders to update firmware in the field. The use of a complete CANopen stack for the bootloader is mostly unsuitable, because of the large flash memory footprint.
To avoid this waste of flash memory, emotas developed a new CANopen Bootloader that needs only few memory resources. The bootloader supports the necessary services (SDO, NMT slave, heartbeat producer) and objects. So resource saving 6 to 8 KiB of flash memory are sufficient for the emotas bootloader – and it is still CANopen compatible.

The CANopen Bootloader is available for different 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers and can easily be adapted to other targets. SDO block transfer is optionally availabe as well. It is delivered as ANSI-C source code and thus can be extended by customers e.g. with a password protection mechanism, firmware encryption or a manufacturer-specific back door.