this is a good idea, though we should only erase app if button is hold long enough e.g 5 seconds, there would be an sequence of indicator e.g

• within second 0-4 the led will start to blink slowly, and
• at 5 second it will either blink faster or solid light. Also change RGB color as well.
• Only start erasing if user left off the button to prevent re-enter this mode once erasing complete

I'm thinking about how to implement this, and I'm not 100% sure.

The system timer ticks fire at different intervals depending on what state things are in. Does it make sense to have a 1ms tick, and base everything off of that? That would make timing specific times like 5 seconds for erase a little more straightforward.

The alternative is to keep track of the current tick interval, and use that to count. But that will fail if the ticks are turned off during any time you want to keep track of time intervals.

I would add a new indicator state for holding button, that would make thing in sync with other. The timer interval could be choose to be a bit different than other state (along with RGB) mostly to inform user.

I'm actually working on 2 separate projects: 1 deeply embedded with no access to buttons, and one handheld with too-easy access to buttons. The latter case has exactly 2 buttons total, one of which is used for the DFU mode as well as a standard meaning once the app starts.

Here's the scenario:

• The user powers up the device, and isaccidentally pressing the DFU button, because that button happens to have function during normal device operation.
• The device is battery powered, so there's not a trivial way to completely remove power.
• The user doesn't know anything about DFU, upgrades, or anything else. He just wants his device to work.
• If there was an immediate erase, that would be bad -- the user would have a device stuck in DFU mode, nowhere near a computer, nor any idea how to recover it.
• The device will stay in DFU mode forever unless we put some other timeout in there.

So, here's my proposed behavior that I think works for everything:

• If the button is pressed atcheck_dfu_mode(), then stay in DFU mode
• If the button is released within the timeout, then boot the app if it exists.
• If the button is held longer than 5 seconds, erase the app.

Is there really any point in staying in the DFU andnot erasing the app? I can't really imagine why you'd want to force an 'enter DFU state' but not erase the app.

I just pushed a version with my proposed behavior. It's a bit more of a change than I thought it would be -- but I'm not sure I could make it a whole lot simpler -- just the way all the bits interact seem to reach into a few more places than expected.

I also updated the LED specifications so the timer interval is specified in the same spot as the RGB colors. I hope that's okay. If not, I can revert it back.