alt Hacker NewsHaving the firmware image just be a boring old tarball + hash sounds super nice. I wish more devices were this open, and I hope Rode won't see this and decide to lock the firmware upgrades down.
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I had to upgrade the firmware in my HP printer a couple years ago.
It’s a printer that I think was released in ~2009 (I am not able to check right now), and in order to upgrade the RAM to 256MB I needed to do a firmware update.
I dreaded this, but then I found out that all you do to update the firmware was FTP a tarball to the printer over the network. I dropped it in with FileZilla, it spent a few minutes whirring, and my firmware was updated.
Then I got mad that firmware updates are ever more complicated than that. Let me FTP or SCP or SFTP a blob there, do a checksum or something for security reasons, and then do nothing else.
I think it should be locked down to require some kind of physical button input to enable the commands, putting it in some kind of "DFU" mode. Otherwise anything with USB access could brick your device by flashing a bad firmware.
I don't want my audio interface to run SSH (and have some random authorized key added), personally.
In the off chance anybody from Rode sees this: This makes me want to purchase your gear. Don't change it.
It's funny this comes up now. Tomorrow I'm dragging my Zoom R20 recorder on-site to use as an overly-featured USB audio interface for a single-mic live stream. If I'd know this about Rode a week ago I'd have purchased one of these and could have left my R20 hooked-up in the home studio!