Testing and Monitoring Tools for Serial Transfers in Embedded Systems

Microcontroller based embedded systems are accentuated and continuously developing. The communication between the microcontrollers embedded in a product became necessary as their number increased. The communication is done via serial buses. Two of them, widely found in microcontrollers, are LIN (Local Interconnect Network) and SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface). They are one master - many slave buses. The problem of testing and monitoring serial transfers on LIN and SPI buses was approached in this paper in order to build, debug and test multi-microcontroller systems. Starting from an existing hardware which connects a SPI bus to a PC via the CAN bus and another existing hardware which connects a LIN bus to a PC, dedicated software tools were created for accessing the information flowing on SPI and LIN buses between several modules. The LIN tool has also the possibility to interfere in the LIN communication by sending LIN headers, LIN responses and generating LIN typical errors. Time and frequency constraints were imposed by the application and structural constraints were imposed by the given hardware based on the ST10F276 microcontroller.