On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Vitaliy <spam@maksimov.org> wrote:
> Thanks for the great ideas. I especially like your "CheckResult" solution, I
> think ROM is not a major issue on the higher-end PICs, and one can always
> develop on a PIC with 256K of Flash, then use a 32K version for production.
>
> I just *may* try it one of these days! :)

It seems to me that testing of embedded software is not an easy task.
Last time, I was doing a 2k word firmware using PIC16C72A and HiTech
PICC. It is not possible to use the UART (the chip does not have
UART). So I was using some LEDs for debugging and ICE2000.

It was a simple firmware but the product was supposed to be
critical. So we went through functional tests in both Singapore
and Germany. Then we walked through the code together.
After that, another company went through the code again and
came out a better documentation for SIL 2 (IEC61508) submission.

Then on Friday I was assigned by my manager to interview
a firmware engineer who is supposed to know quite a bit
of RTOS and Industrial communication (Serial, USB, CAN,
Ethernet, DeviceNet, Ethernet/IP, etc). Take note I myself
only have some overview of these topics but I was not bad
at interview people (learned something in this list as well).

So I was asking the same question how he could do unit
testing on the firmware. He acknowledged that this was
difficult topic.

Some other question I asked.
1) If you were to improve on the CAN specification,
what will you do to improve the speed?

2) Why do you need something like VxWorks to
implement the Ethernet/IP stack? What is
the benefit of using an RTOS?


Xiaofan
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