Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
Back in 2004, the startup Virtutech built a crazy demo for the 2004 Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). Back then, ESC was the place to be, and Virtutech was there with a battery of demos to blast the competition. The most interesting demo from a technology perspective was the 1002-machine network, as described in an Intel Developer Zone blog post of mine.
Continue reading “Intel Blog Post: Simulation a Thousand Target Machines – in 2004 and 2018”
I had the honor to have a scheduled talk at the Embedded World 2018 show in Nürnberg, right at the start of the show on Tuesday morning. Getting to Nürnberg for the Embedded World without paying a fortune for plane tickets is tricky due to all the other people flying down from Swedish embedded and tech firms at the same time. This year, I was lucky and I had managed to get a very convenient flight at a decent price. Leaving Stockholm in the afternoon around 14.00 on Monday, flying via Frankfurt and then on to Nürnberg, arriving in the early evening just in time for a nice Bavarian dinner. No stress, no late evenings on the U-Bahn into town. A good night’s sleep before getting up and getting to the show with plenty of time to set up for my talk. What could possibly go wrong?
I 
will be presenting an Exhibitor Forum talk at the Embedded World in Nürnberg next week, about how to get to Agile and small batches for embedded. Using simulation to get around the annoying hard aspect of hardware.
More details at https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2018/02/19/embedded-world-getting-agile-with-simulation
I have posted a two-part blog post to the public Intel Developer Zone blog, about the “Small Batches Principle” and how simulation helps us achieve it for complicated hardware-software systems. I found the idea of the “small batch” a very good way to frame my thinking about what it is that simulation really brings to system development. The key idea I want to get at is this:
[…] the small batches principle: it is better to do work in small batches than big leaps. Small batches permit us to deliver results faster, with higher quality and less stress.
Continue reading “Intel Blog Post: Getting to Small Batches in System Development using Simulation”
I read some news (ExtremeTech, Techcrunch) about how “smart” wifi-connected locks sold by Lockstate got bricked by an automatic over-the-network update. This sounds bad – but it is bad for a good reason. I think the company should be lauded for actually having the ability – and laughed out for royally botching it.
Continue reading “Smart Locks Bricked by Bad Update? The Right Approach!”
Today, when developing embedded control systems, it is standard practice to test control algorithms against some kind of “world model”, “plant model” or “environment simulator”.
Using a simulated control system or a virtual platform running the actual control system code, connected to the world model lets you test the control system in a completely virtual and simulated environment (see for example my Trinity of Simulation blog post from a few years ago). This practice of simulating the environment for a control computer is long-standing in the aerospace field in particular, and I have found that it goes back at least to the Apollo program.
Continue reading “Simulation and the Apollo Guidance Computer”
Doing continuous integration and continuous delivery for embedded systems is not necessarily all that easy. You need to get tools in place to support automatic testing, and free yourself from unneeded hardware dependencies. Based on an inspiring talk by Mike Long from Norway, I have a piece on how simulation helps with embedded CI and CD on my Software Evangelist blog on the Intel Developer Zone.
I have a two-part series (one, two) on testing posted on my Software Evangelist blog on the Intel Developer Zone. This is a long piece where I get back to the interesting question of how you test things and the fact that testing is not just the same as development. I call the posts Mindset and Toolset
Continue reading “Intel Blog: The Right Mindset and Toolset for Testing”
It is really sad that the European Space Agency (ESA) lost their Schiaparelli lander last year, as we will miss out on a lot of Mars science. From a software engineering and testing perspective, the story of why the landing failed rather instructive, though. It gets down to how software can be written and tested to deal with unexpected inputs in unexpected circumstances. I wrote a piece about this on my blog at the Intel Developer Zone. Update: read the 2022 take on Schiaparelli loss on this blog. The Intel blog post has been retired.
This really happened last week, but I was in the US for the DAC then. I did another blog on Intel Software blog, about a white paper that Wind River put out about how they use Simics internally. The white paper is a really good set of examples of how Simics can be used for software development, test, and debug – regardless of how old or new the hardware is. It also touches my favorite topic of IoT simulation and scaling up – Wind River is actually using Simics for 1000+ node tests of IoT software! Read on at https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2016/06/06/wind-river-uses-simics-test-massive-iot-networks/
Thanks to the good folks at Vector Software, I was pointed to a conference recording on Youtube, from the Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) 2015 (Youtube video). The recording covers quite a few talks, but at around 4 hours 38 minutes, Brian Gogan describes the testing used for the Chromecast product. This offers a very cool insight into how networked consumer systems are being tested at Google. Brian labels the Chromecast as an “Internet of Things” device*, and pitches his talk as being about IoT testing. While I might disagree about his definition of IoT, he is definitely right that the techniques presented are applicable to IoT systems, or at least individual devices.
Continue reading “Google ”IoT” Testing for Chromecast: Cloud Emulation + Physical Gear”
I just added a new blog post on the Wind River blog, about how you do fault injection with Simics. This blog post covers the new fault injection framework we added in Simics 5, and the interesting things you can do when you add record and replay capabilities to spontaneous interactive work with Simics. There is also a Youtube demo video of the system in action.
The Security Now Podcast number 497 dealt with the topic of Vehicle Hacking. It was fairly interesting, if a bit too light on the really interesting thing which is what actually went on in the vechicle hack that was apparently demonstrated on US national television at some point earlier this year (I guess this CBS News transcript fits the description). It was still good to hear the guys from the Galois consulting firm (Lee Pike and Pat Hickey) talking about what they did. Sobering to realize just how little even a smart guy like Steve Gibson really knows about embedded systems and the reality of their programming. Embedded software really is pretty invisible in both a good way and a bad way.
Continue reading “Security Now on Hacking Vehicles – A Bit of Let-Down”
I have been thinking about the role and prestige of testing for the past several years. Many things I have read and things companies have done indicate that “testing” is something that is considered a bit passe and old-school. Testers are dead weight that get into the way of releases, and they are unproductive barnacles that slow development down. Testers can all be replaced by automatic testing put in place by brilliant developers. The creative developer types are the guys with the status anyway. I might be exaggerating, but there is an issue here. I think we need to be acknowledge that testers are a critical part of the software quality puzzle, and that testing is not just something developers can do with one hand tied behind their back.
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the Trinity of Simulation – the computer, the system, and the world. It discusses how you build a really complete system model using not just a virtual platform like Simics, but you also integrate it with a model of the system the computer sits in, as well as the world around it. Like this:
Read more about it in the blog post, and all the older blog posts it links to!