I bought a DIY Thermocam kit around 10 years ago, it's great have used it on and off since. What isn't great is that I never got the USB-mass storage feature working. I thought that old firmware was to blame, I'd never upgraded it. It was currently running v1.05, the latest is v1.25. Should be simple to upgrade right... Right?

The Hunt For Ancient Firmware

The first issue was finding copies of the v1 firmware. I checked the official site, this pointed to the GitHub repo which only had copies of v2 and v3. Next I thought Internet Archive might have an old copy of the site, it did but the download links were broken.

Next I turned to scouring the general internet and found not one but two file listings all had dead links. Again to the Internet Archive, it had a copy of a directory listing of all the firmware versions, except once again the download links were broken 😠.

The only downloadable copy I could find was on Softpedia. I didn't really trust it. The dates and sizes were about right, but I didn't want to risk bricking my camera with corrupt firmware. Also, they didn't have the latest version: v1.25.

I contacted the author, Max Ritter, asking if he had copies of the latest firmware. Literally 5 minutes later, I got a response with several versions of the firmware attached!

For what it's worth, version 1.23 on Softpedia matched the official version (sha256:33e30279a6f94d4892a85e86fc40326a37f7c0753b929f8af1ea717603c61144).

Now To Actually Write The Firmware

Originally it seems there was a dedicated Update.exe, but I think that was probably only required for Windows systems. I selected 'Firmware upgrade' mode in the camera UI and connected it to my PC. lsusb showed a new device:

Bus 005 Device 014: ID 16c0:0478 Van Ooijen Technische Informatica Teensy Halfkay Bootloader

The brains of the Thermocam is a Teensy 3.2 so flashing was as simple as teensy_loader_cli --mcu=mk20dx256 -v Firmware.hex:

Teensy Loader, Command Line, Version 2.2
Read "Firmware.hex": 211920 bytes, 80.8% usage
Found HalfKay Bootloader
Programming................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Booting

It worked perfectly. The new firmware had a bunch of new features, and it all seemed a bit faster. USB mass storage mode still doesn't work though...