Getting Started

OTA-Pulse is an over-the-air firmware update platform for Linux and embedded device fleets. It gives engineers a central place to upload firmware artifacts, push deployments to any number of devices, and watch each device move through the update lifecycle in real time. If you maintain a fleet of connected Linux boards and want reliable, auditable updates with automatic rollback, this guide is for you.

What you’ll learn

• How to install the OTA-Pulse agent (soc-ota-agent) on a Linux device using Yocto, Buildroot, or a manual binary install
• How to register your first device and confirm it is online in the console
• How to upload a firmware artifact and ship it to a device

The whole sequence takes about 15 minutes once you have your device connected to the network.

Before you start

Make sure you have:

• A Linux device or board (ARM or x86_64, 512 MB RAM minimum) running systemd with kernel 4.x+
• Dual A/B root partitions on the target device (the agent uses A/B partition switching for atomic updates)
• An OTA-Pulse account and a tenant token (available from the console under Settings → API Keys)
• IP connectivity between the device and the OTA-Pulse backend (http://<server-ip>:8000)
• SSH access to the device for initial setup

Note

If you are using the official Yocto (meta-otapulse) or Buildroot (buildroot-otapulse) integration in dynamic partition mode, you do not need to pre-provision dual partitions: the otapulse-firstboot service runs on the first boot and automatically creates the rootfs_b and data partitions from free disk space.

If you are doing a manual binary install on a device without dual A/B partitions, you can still follow the install and console-verification steps — set both RootfsPartA and RootfsPartB to the same device path in the config. The agent will register and report telemetry; the firmware install step will fail with a partition-mismatch error when an OTA deployment is attempted, but registration and monitoring work.

Next steps

Install the agent

Add soc-ota-agent to your device image via the Yocto layer (meta-otapulse), the Buildroot external tree (buildroot-otapulse), or a manual binary copy over SSH.

Install the agent →

Register your first device

Write the agent config (/etc/otapulse/otapulse.conf), enable the systemd service, and watch the device appear online in the console.

Register your first device →

Ship your first update

Build a firmware artifact, upload it, create a deployment, and watch the device apply the update from the console.

Ship your first update →