Marionette

Abstract

A main challenge with developing applications for wireless embedded systems is the lack of visibility and control during execution of an application. In this paper, we present a tool suite called Marionette that provides the ability to call functions and to read or write variables on pre-compiled, embedded programs at run-time, without requiring the programmer to add any special code to the application. This rich interface facilitates interactive development and debugging at minimal cost to the node.

Bringing Modern Unit Testing Techniques to Sensornets

“…Software quality assurance in sensornets is a multifaceted topic covering, among others, programming languages [Gay et al 2003], design patterns ], memory safety [Cooprider et al 2007], interface contracts ], automated design inference [Kothari et al 2008], integrated development environments [Burri et al 2006], and debugging tools [Iwanicki and van Steen 2007;Ramanathan et al 2005;Romer and Ma 2009;Whitehouse et al 2006;Yang et al 2007], to name just a few examples. In this article, however, we focus on testing.…”

“…The nesC code of the module runs on a node; the Python test code runs on a PC. To combine the two environments, MUnit exports all nesC functions of the tested module into Python prototypes, such that each invocation of a Python function prototype on the PC is transformed into an invocation of the corresponding nesC function on a sensor node through an Embedded Remote Procedure Call (ERPC) [Whitehouse et al 2006]. In other words, a sensor node acts as an ERPC server, whereas the actual testing takes place on the PC and boils down to remotely invoking subsequent functions of the server and checking their results.…”

TinyDebug: Multi-Purpose Passive Debugging Framework for Embedded Wireless Systems

“…TinyDebug unifies event logging, collection and processing by providing an efficient passive debugging mechanism which can be used out-of-the-box or as a basic building block to implement advanced debugging techniques in different environments. This includes logging mechanisms such as code annotations [13] or automatic insertions [5,11], event collection mechanisms [9,7], event trace analyzers [5,11,8], or user interactive debugging methods [13,14,3] . Hence, TinyDebug does not enable any novel debugging methods but instead unifies existing once by providing an efficient general purpose event logging mechanism which can be used by the developer at all stages in the development process.…”

“…Taking the development a step further from simulation, a testbed (at any scale) is limited by the capacity of its back-channel, and a real deployment can be limited down to a few flags embedded in a data packet. These limitations can make it impossible to employ advanced user-driven interactive debug methods [12,13,14,3] and hence one would have to do with some form of passive debugging mechanism which is the subject of this paper.…”

Ασύρματα Δίκτυα Αισθητήρων Που Υποστηρίζουν Αρχιτεκτονικές Υπηρεσιών Ιστού

“…Επιπλέον, είναι δυνατή η εξυπηρέτηση RESTful υπηρεσιών ιστού. Εκτός τούτου, το TinyOS έχει ενσωµατωµένο το embedded remote procedure call (ERPC)[Whitehouse et al, 2006] το οποίο επιτρέπει σε αποµονωµένους πελάτες να καλέσουν διάφορες µεθόδους χρησιµοποιώντας την τεχνική RPC και την XML φόρµα µηνυµάτων. Με το ERPC γίνεται Ερευνητικό υπόβαθρο της διδακτορικής διατριβής 133 Kbytes RAM, 48 Kbytes flash µνήµη για αποθήκευση του προγράµµατος προς εκτέλεση και 1Mbyte flash µνήµη για αποθήκευση των µετρήσεων των αισθητήρων.…”