#firmware

Posts tagged #firmware

1. Question

   How do you unit test firmware? We test almost nothing on host

   Honest question. In my team all the testing is on the target hardware: flash, run, look at the logs and the scope. We have some integration tests on a HIL bench but zero unit tests. When I propose unit tests, the people say is impossible because the code touch registers everywhere. Is a codebase of around 60k lines of C, STM32, FreeRTOS. The drivers call the HAL directly from the application logic in many places.…

   Diego RamírezSep 27, 20263likes3comments

2. Article

   volatile is not a mutex: sharing data between an ISR and your main loop

   Every few months a junior in my team come with the same bug: a counter updated in an interrupt, read in the main loop, and sometimes the value is garbage. And the first answer is always "but I put volatile". So here is the explanation I give them, maybe is useful for someone else. What volatile does volatile tells the compiler: this variable can change outside of the normal program flow, so read it from memory every…

   Diego RamírezSep 9, 20263likes3comments