Virtual plugfest -- looking for testers

Let’s have a virtual plug-fest.

As UAVCAN v1.0 is approaching, the question of testing is slowly becoming more relevant. Please let us know in this thread if you will be able to lend a hand with testing against our standard implementations (libuavcan, libcanard, pyuavcan, uavcan.rs); and, most importantly, if you need hardware, please also let us know which kind.

The standard hardware set would likely include some kind of a demo board for a CAN FD capable MCU, a CAN transceiver for it (or several if there are redundant interfaces), and a USB CAN adapter for PC. Such as:

  • ST NUCLEO-H743Z
  • MIKROE-2299 (MCP2542 transceiver breakout board)
  • PCAN-USB FD (other options welcome)

Hi Pavel

I already on hand are 2 MCP2542 CLICK breakout boards. I have already on order 2 NUCLEO DEV BOARD STM32H743ZI boards but they are on backorder from Digikey. Also looking at using the Arduino IDE for STM32 - it will cut down on my development effort. You can see the issue here: https://github.com/stm32duino/Arduino_Core_STM32/issues/227,

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What do you think of setting up a virtual lab to which core devs could SSH into and that Travis could use for validation ? The second step is probably a lot of work, but just having a UAVCAN “cluster” to SSH into could be nice.

Antoine

@antoine.albertelli I’m not sure I understand the advantages of that approach compared to just compiling and running test nodes locally? Except perhaps not having to compile stuff locally, but if you’re a dev you will have to deal with that sooner or later anyway. I am definitely not against that, I just suspect that I’m missing something.

@cybermerln I have replied to your DM regarding the adapter, not sure if you got the message (we had a brief problem with this website recently). I need your shipping address to order one for you. Thanks!

Pavel
This might be a cheaper alternative to the PCAN-USB FD: Virtual plugfest -- looking for testers

mike

You seem to have posted a wrong link by mistake.

Oh shoot my apologies: http://skpang.co.uk/catalog/mcp2517fd-can-fd-breakout-with-teensy-include-teensy-32-p-1549.html.

For me the most interesting part would be if you want to have access to other hardware. For example CAN-FD hardware is not readily available, so it might be a way to share it. Or also if you want to test on other platforms, with maybe different RTOS?

It could also serve as a first step to introduce hardware testing in the CI environment.

Would you or someone else from your team be up to set that up if we provided you with the hardware?

What about SocketCan testing? our board, has a MicroChip mcp251x connected over SPI. However support is configured to use socketCAN and not traditional UART/Serial. We have a couple myxa’s and an orel 20. We may end up using a babel and socket can simultaneously during our testing.

Socketcan seems to becoming more prevalent because of tools like wire shark. However I do not have a sense for what all this layering does (for latency). We are interested in running a test suite and contributing results based on our hardware configuration.

Roger

I think I can give a hand yeah. I borrowed some hardware from the team to do a proof of concept, I will try to implement it this weekend to see if it is useful to somebody. I borrowed one F4 development platform with CAN transceiver and one SocketCAN-compatible adapter.

On a longer time scale, I am not sure of where I can host it though. We don’t have reliable internet in our team space and I don’t really have enough space at my place. Let’s see if it is useful first.

I just received two of the MCP2517FD click boards that I am planning to try out with my Teensies and SKPrang’s firmware for the teensy. Just waiting for a few extra parts I need to give it a test. I did order the board but they are closed until Monday. The api he uses is from Microchip so it should be adaptable for any SPI.

I wonder if something like https://buildkite.com/ might be useful here. We could provide some standard test environments that could be brought up as needed and as people had free resources. It’s more of a test marketplace then a fixed environment so there may be some need to pester people to setup an attach a given test environment for certain things.

If hosting is a problem and the demand is there, we can theoretically host it in our lab in Tallinn. We have a regular office-grade fiber optics connection, so its availability is so-so, but should be acceptable (I think there were like two transient service disruptions over the last 12 months or so). Let’s see.

@pavel.kirienko : let’s talk about using build kite. I’ve used this service in the past and they have a free-for-open-source plan. It allows us to setup build/test pipelines that anyone can contribute resources to. If Zubax can host resources then great! But if I have a dev kit you want to run tests on then I’d be able to connect a buildkite agent to one of our pipelines.

I just setup a quick UAVCAN organization and it still works as well as when I used it a few years ago.

(They are Australian but I wouldn’t hold that against them)

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Let’s discuss that on the Monday dev call. Anyone interested is also welcome to join.

Just as a quick update I hooked up the Click boards to a Teensy 3.2 and a Teensy 3.5. Did not have any issue in transferring CAN-FD packets between the boards. For SPI there is a 20Mhz limit and it appears will only support up to 5Mbits on the CAN-FD bus.