Why pic bootloader

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As others have stated, you don't need a bootloader for PIC microcontrollers and most others from other companies, in fact I know of no microcontrollers that require one. Some products are designed with headers that allow a programmer to be connected after the product is put into a case, but most are not. I have used two different ways of upgrading firmware without a hardware programmer. Both require bootloaders to be flashed into program memory, usually at the very beginning or very end of program memory area.

Ideally, once the bootloader is flashed, then this portion of memory can be write-protected, so an errant application program cannot erase the bootloader. One way to upgrade firmware is to provide the application on an SD card, and have a slot in the product that allows this to be accessed.

Each time the microcontroller starts up, it checks to see if the application on the SD card is different from the one in flash, and if so update it. You don't want to blindly download and flash the program each time since flash has a limited number of erase cycles.

Another way to upgrade firmware is FOTA -- firmware over the air. In this case, the firmware is downloaded over some wireless connection, such as a cell modem, bluetooth, or Wi-Fi. It is then flashed into program memory. A variation is to combine the two, whereas the new program is downloaded and written to an SD card, since it may not be practical to flash the program as it is being downloaded.

For installing bootloader program, we need an external programmer. In order to install Bootloader driver, we need to enter into the Boot mode. Keep pressing the reset button while connecting the USB cable to the port. This will enter to the boot mode and you can see below status in Taskbar. So we need to point to the required files to install it manually.

To install, take Device Manager from Control panel. There you can see a section Other Devices. The Unknown Device which is listed under is our required device. Press Next. We detect you are using an unsupported browser. For the best experience, please visit the site using Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.

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