Hacker News Reader

Last year we implemented "ymodem over BLE" for reasons that are complicated and possibly stupid.

It felt familiar but strange and wrong to do such a thing. Worked great though.

I still use these protocols for embedded systems. There is almost always a CLI on a UART, so one should be able to transfer files.

Ymodem is simpler and smaller than Zmodem, but we've used both. I've used Zmodem at 921600 baud, but it needs fairly large buffers (for a UART) to work.

One of the big advantages is that TeraTerm for Windows exists, and supports xyzmodem. It means that I often don't have to write any host-side software for things like firmware update, and more important, don't have to touch Windows.

A former employer still insists on using Xmodem-1K even though Ymodem is almost the same and provides so many quality of life improvements with the header block. It was endlessly annoying to have to manually tell the receiving end the file size and name when a simple upgrade would obviate the need.

> I still use these protocols for embedded systems

I have a brand new system sitting here next to me on the bench that uses SLIP framing for packetizing Protobufs :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com