Microcontrollers do not directly understand human-readable code. The firmware code is written in the C language by the programmer. This needs to be converted to a binary format that can be understood by the Particle microcontrollers. A program called a compiler does this conversion.
A local setup is required to be able to work with firmware. Such a setup provides you with all the software and packages needed to compile and deploy the firmware.
Flashing firmware involves two main steps:
Obtaining firmware.
Burning firmware onto the device.
To be able to flash a firmware, we need to get the firmware file in binary format. There are two ways you can obtain the firmware:
Direct download
Building from source
The easiest way to get the latest firmware is to download it from the firmware release page at https://github.com/spark/firmware/releases/.
At the time of writing of this book, the latest firmware available for...