I recently purchased a sparkfun variable load kit (KIT-14449) from Arrow electronics on Sept 29th 2023 and received, built, and during testing found it had pre 2018 firmware installed. The product I receive has a batch number #108143 and I verified with SparkFun support that this board was indeed built before May, 24th, 2018.
I purchased this board intending to be able to modify and update the firmware on it. I did not think that there would still be any pre May 24th , 2018 devices still on Vendors shelves, but I was wrong.
I’ve read through posts on this forum indicating that in order to flash an old variable load board, which does not have a boot load installed, requires a hardware PSoC programmer from Infineon (MiniProg3 or 4) in order to update the firmware. This solution seems unreasonable given that the cost of the PSoC programming costs 2x what I paid for the variable load kit.
Are there other alternative to get my board updated with the latest firmware containing a bootloader or am I just stuck with this old device?