Testbench Framework for Testing Hardware Interfaces of Embedded Boards

Abstract

Due to continuous scaling down in the Embedded technology, and hence the boards have become more prone to the hardware working strikes and the sources of hardware working strikes can be many like irregularity in board design, wrongly reading of schematic and wrongly fabrication. The hardware interfaces play a vital role in application/integration of board with other devices. Thus, the hardware testing is a very important procedure after the board get designed. Manually it is very difficult to find the hardware interface health and its working condition whether it is good or bad. Thus, the problem of concern is the reliability of the board affected by the hardware working strikes. So, a Testbench framework has been proposed for testing of different hardware interfaces on any embedded board. Later, in this thesis work application is proposed which inherently testing the Ethernet interface and also logging the data over the Graphical user interface of the Ethernet module designed. It contains the analysis of Ethernet based speed controller for DC motor using arm cortex processor. The implementation of ARM-oriented controller as a programmable controller to drive is used with the following benefits: The hardware conformation to control data accumulation is decreased as ARM- controller includes 12-bit A/D and PWM generator as an in-built feature. As a result, highly accurate outcomes in terms of calculation are seen alongside the PID control. Controlling program accumulated in 256 KB of flash ROM of microcontroller, or external interfacing memories, as well as DC motor speed exploration specimens, are transferred to a remote computer for storing in the database. The ability of standard Visual Studios 2010 alongside Origin 6.1 packages is utilized to control, display as well as represent graphically (GUI). The GUI here used is capturing the speed in (rpm) which is being controlled by the third order PID controller. Keil4 IDE using JTAG debugger can debug as well as simulate the embedded C language Program Code analysis. With the help of developed Testbench framework we can easily test any of the hardware interfaces of any embedded boards which includes Raspberry Pi, Beagle-bone etc.