Building an On-Device Embedded Testing Library

There are too few C/C++ testing libraries designed for embedded devices. The traditional libraries are not designed for constrained resources and rely on host functionality like a filesystem or standard output.

In this post, I detail why I’ve decided to design a new testing library for microcontrollers and cover the rationale, design choices, and thoughts on the prototype.

Balancing Test Coverage vs. Overhead

In a perfect world, all software and firmware are given precisely the time and budget it needs to be successful, code is uniformly well-written to industry best practices, and the code is complemented with a complete test suite instrumenting all aspects of the software.

In practice, this rarely, if ever, happens! Development teams and organizations continually have to re-prioritize tasks to meet deadlines and avoid going over budget. In this article, we’ll cover how you can think about rapidly modifying and updating firmware, testing these changes, all the while allowing you to get the product out the door.

Firmware Testing with Renode and GitHub Actions

In this post, I cover what it takes to build a simple firmware for use with Renode, how to build and administer tests with Robot Framework, and how to run these tests within GitHub’s continuous integration system.

Cortex-M MCU Emulation with Renode

In this post, I walk through setting up the Renode emulator and running a firmware in it for STM32. Using that setup, we’ll debug our firmware, run it through integrated tests, and shorten the iteration cycle of development.