Event based programming with IoAbstraction and tcMenu
Please understand that I work for a company full time. The libraries are maintained in my spare time and during some of my time off. These courses help towards hosting and app development costs, are only available for a few days, and need to be planned with at least a few weeks to a months notice. Course Summary IoAbstraction and TcMenu are libraries that make writing software for embedded boards easier, and generally more like writing for the desktop.
Unit testing embedded and Arduino projects
When you’ve got more than the simplest embedded program for Arduino (or any other framework), it becomes much harder to test that it’s working properly by purely running it. For something like Blink, testing is simple because all we need to do is upload it and see the LED turn on and off; there’s little risk of missing anything significant. However, let’s skip forward to a menu based application with Serial or Ethernet control, there is very little chance that you’d catch all the edge cases by manual testing.
Stabilising an existing Arduino or embedded product
Sometimes the situation arises where a product is built (or gets close to being built), before any concerns about it’s stability are discussed or proper planning arranged. Often this leads to code being written without any proper test plan in place. Combined with very tight deadlines there’s often even no plan to go back and fix things up. Once this situation occurs, it’s probable that the product release will be compromised.
Getting started Unit testing with Arduino platform
This article discusses how to unit test a simple project with Arduino, if you’re not used to writing unit tests, or need more background, then first read this guide on unit testing embedded projects. Presently, all our testing using a custom test framework that is built into IoAbstraction, it can be considered as the least number of components that implement a test framework. It works pretty well overall, we wrote this because we needed the testing to work on all Arduino boards, and even mbed boards too.
