I’ve been a software engineer for over twenty years, and one of the things that has always fascinated me is testing. Unit testing, integration testing, TDD, BDD, automated testing, CI tools: all of it gives me the warm fuzzies. A solid testing approach gives an engineering team the confidence that a product works as it should, and a safety net to refactor and evolve a codebase without fear of breaking everything.
When I joined blues wireless last year, one of the tasks I took on was maintenance of the open source libraries and SDKs in our GitHub organization. We have libraries for using the Notecard (our core hardware product) with Arduino, C/C++, Go, and my personal favorite language, Python.
I figured there was no better way to jump into maintaining a new library than to write some tests. And since I’m a sucker for new hardware projects, I decided to use the blues wireless Notecard to create an IoT status light to visually display the results of test runs and CI builds.
The complete source for this project, including ESP32 firmware and Workflow files for GitHub Actions are in the notecard-build-monitor GitHub repo.
The hardware I chose for this project is the blues wireless Notecard. The Notecard is a cellular and GPS-enabled device-to-cloud data-pump that comes with 500 MB of data and 10 years of cellular service for $49. No activation charges, and no monthly fees.
The Notecard is a small 30 by 34 mm SoM that’s ready to embed in a custom project via its m.2 connector. But blues also provides a series of expansion boards, called Notecarriers, that include an m.2 socket for the Notecard and a number of other features for prototyping. For this project, I used the Notecarrier-AF, which has onboard cellular and GPS antennas, a LiPo battery port, Grove and Qwiic connectors, and a Feather-compatible header socket, making it perfect for this project.
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