Here's one recurring abuse of language that needs to be standardized in some way. Often it seems that people refer to their "first-cut" trial of some code they whipped up on a napking while waiting for their soup as "testing." I've tried to point out the distinction, but it's still called "testing" in most cases.

What this person, Sathiya Kumar, has raised is another issue tangential to the subject of this thread, but an area that evades testing in the colloquial sense, namely, "How do I verify that my downloader works?"

In some respects, it's not off-topic at all, but rather, quite on. The O/P, Abhishek Bk, wasn't referring to what should really be termed "testing" at all. Abhishek Bk wants, apparently, a way to simulate his MCU behavior under control of a given code set, in a hardware environment not limited to the MCU. There are tools, though not "free" ones, that do this sort of thing. Because of the cost of developing precise models for a very wide range of components, these things tend to cost in the 6 to 7 figure range, so we don't see them used much. Erik has referred to NASA as a body that might use such things, and he's right, in that they are required, mainly because it's hard to send a repair technician to Mars, to rely on simulations. Most of us recognize what relatively primitive tools the "free" simulators available today are and adjust our expectations accordingly. I don't know why someone hasn't included a facility for introducing simulated external stimuli by means of a schedule, which, then, could be manipulated in any of a number of ways in order to produce meaningful results, since external stimuli are seldom totally random.

When I was just a pup, I wrote detailed simulators for various things, some of which one didn't even realize could be characterized sufficiently to allow deterministic simulation. I'd do that for these MCU's except for the following. (1) Guys like Erik would simply say that they're useless because he doesn't like simulators, (2) MCU makers would't provide proper data on the basis of which one could simulate the things, and (3) the last time I did that sort of thing it was in Fortran, and Fortran-II at that, so that was a quite long time ago. I might not last long enough to finish the job.

In any case, this guy, Sathiya Kumar, wants some guidance in "how to do that." He's willing to allow us to suggest a board on which to do it. He's probably willing to "listen." His question is clearly a subset of the O/P, Abishek Bk's query, however poorly stated it may have been.

Perhaps it would be better that he start a different thread, but since this one's already rolling, perhaps we can help everyone by dealing with his query here.

RE