Using unit tests to check Arduino code #Adruino @simonmonk2
Unit testing, writing test routines to ensure your code is doing what it should, is just as applicable to microcontroller development as it is to larger coding environments. Dr. Monk’s DIY Electronics Blog writes:
To my surprise, making a calculator that actually does arithmetic well is a lot harder than expected. One obvious hurdle is that float in Arduino C is only 32 bits. So once your numbers get to about 7 or 8 digits they become disconcertingly approximated. So, I thought, I’m (or used to be) a computer scientist, I’ll just implement my own floating point representation with more precision than you can shake a stick at. So, I did, as a C++ library (I’ll put it on Github when I’ve got it working and tidied up).
However, for the first time, since I had first started using Arduino, I felt the need to write unit tests, to make sure that my number class was doing arithmetic and generating an 8 character string plus decimal point position information that I could then easily map onto an 8 digit 7-segment display.
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