ValBal SHITL

SHITL stands for Some Hardware In The Loop. SHITL testing is a method of testing things before launch, similarly other forms of testing are Hardware in the Loop (HITL) or Hardware Out Of the Loop (HOOTL). The best test is a HITL, which tests all hardware and software components, while a HOOTL is mostly just for software and is a simulation, and a SHITL is somewhere in the middle. It's like shitty version of HITL.

For Valbal, we use a Raspberry Pi to both flash new code to the valbal board, and run tests, all from the comfort of our beds.

Connecting to the Pi

We use SSH to connect to the pi (more info on how to setup SSH on the client side aka your laptop can be fount under section 4 of this guide). Rather than set up a static IP address for the pi, which can be a pain to do properly, we have the pi publish it's ip address whenever it changes to slack to the channel #what-is-valbals-ip. The user name for the defaul user is pi. So an example command to get in is ssh pi@10.34.195.142

In order to get in, you will need an an authorized RSA key. So, before trying to log in message either @johndean or @jcreus to add your public key. For more info on RSA key's refer to here

After that, you should be good to go to SSH into the Pi

Uploading Code

Be in the platformio project folder you want to upload code for, and just run the command push. This calls a short script to do the necessary things.