This page will help you upgrade your own firmware on an Alles hardware speaker.
If you have a recent model (you received it after November 2021), or flashed your firmware after November 2021, you can upgrade your firmware over the internet wirelessly, called OTA, "over-the-air."
After you first set up wifi (and make sure your speaker is on a wifi network that can connect to the internet,) if you turn off, then on the speaker, then press the + button while the "joining wifi" tones are playing (in the few seconds before it plays the turn-on bleep), the speaker will connect to the internet and download the latest released Alles speaker firmware right to the device, then reboot. It takes about a minute, and you'll hear a different (sometimes glitchy sounding -- that's ok --) repeating tone while it works.
If you want to write your own Alles firmware, or have a speaker before December 2021 and need to get it to support wireless upgrading, follow these directions:
The back of the hardware speaker has a micro-USB plug you use for charging. It also can be used to upgrade the firmware. Once you upgrade an Alles speaker to a recent version, you can use the wireless / OTA flashing method going forward.
To do this, you need to set up the following things:
ESP-IDF is the set of open source tools and libraries that work on the CPU powering Alles, the ESP32. You should first install ESP-IDF on your system if you haven't already.
Download the supported version of ESP-IDF. That is currently 5.2. You can download it directly here. Unpack it to a folder. I like to keep them in ~/esp/, as you'll likely want to use different versions eventually. So we'll assume it's in ~/esp/esp-idf-v5.2.
# install ESP-IDF that comes with our repository
~/esp/esp-idf-v5.2/install.sh esp32
source ~/esp/esp-idf-v5.2/export.sh
If you have trouble, for more info, or for other platforms, you should follow the detailed instructions to download and set up esp-idf.
If using macOS, you'll want to also install the CP210X drivers if you haven't already.
You likely already have this, but if not, clone this repository.
The cable you may have received from us for the hardware speaker is charge only. Find a longer micro-USB cable that transmits data and connect it to the computer and speaker.
Then, in the esp folder you created during installing the ESP-IDF above (e.g. cd ~/esp), run . ./esp-idf-v5.2/export.sh. Now, in the same terminal window (export.sh sets some environment variables), cd back into the alles repository folder you downloaded and run idf.py flash to build and flash to the board. It will take a couple of minutes and show you progress. The board will reboot into the latest firmware.
(If the flashing process doesn't work, it's likely not finding your UART location. Type ls /dev/*usb* to find something like /dev/tty.usbserial.XXXXX or /dev/cu.usbserialXXXX. You'll want to find the tty that appears when you connect the speaker to computer. Copy this location and try flashing again with idf.py -p /dev/YOUR_SERIAL_TTY flash.)
If you want to see debugging messages, use idf.py -p /dev/YOUR_SERIAL_TTY monitor to reboot the board and see stdout/stderr. Use Ctrl-] to exit the monitor.