You rarely have to even think about the system firmware.
On a Wi-Fi device (Photon, P1, P0) the system firmware gets automatically upgraded over the air anytime you build an application against a newer system. It looks like this:
- you flash a new application to your Photon
- then you see the device start up in “safe mode” with a magenta LED
- this means your application is not running, but the device connected to the cloud using system firmware alone
- the cloud detects the unmet dependency and does an OTA flash of the version of system firmware your app depends on
- the device reboots successfully running your new application, and the LED breathes cyan like normal
You may see people refer to that feature as Safe Mode Healer (SMH).
On the Electron we do not automatically perform OTA updates because we want you to have full control over data usage costs. You can still, for example, use the CLI to flash system parts or your application firmware either OTA or over the wire.
Lately we have been releasing system firmware about once a month, sometimes more often. You can follow the Particle Firmware Update Thread if you want to hear about releases.
Happy building!