Test Automation with Embedded Hardware

Question

Has anyone had success automating testing directly on embedded hardware?

Specifically, I am thinking of automating a battery of unit tests for hardw

Answer 1

Yes. I have had success, but it is not a stragiht-forward problem to solve. In a nutshell here is what my team did:

1. Defined a variety of unit tests using a home-built C unit-testing framework. Basically, just a lot of macros, most of which were named TEST_EQUAL, TEST_BITSET, TEST_BITVLR, etc.

2. Wrote a boot code generator that took these compiled tests and orchestrated them into an execution environment. It's just a small driver that executes our normal startup routine - but instead of going into the control loop, it executes a test suite. When done, it stores the last suite to run in flash memory, then it resets the CPU. It will then run then next suite. This is to provide isolation incase a suite dies. (However, you may want to disable this to make sure your modules cooperate. But that's an integration test, not a unit test.)

3. Individual tests would log their output using the serial port. This was OK for our design because the serial port was free. You will have to find a way to store your results if all your IO is consumed.

It worked! And it was great to have. Using our custom datalogger, you could hit the "Test" button, and a couple minutes later, you would have all the results. I highly recommend it.

Updated to clarify how the test driver works.