U-boot automation

_posts/2023-07-09-uboot-automation.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title:  "Automate all the things: u-boot mmc and automated testing"
+date:   2023-07-09 19:07:00 -0300
+categories: hardware embedded test-automation
+tags: hardware embedded yocto test-automation
+---
+
+I've spent the whole week trying to get ethernet to work on my Orange Pi One Plus (spoiler: it still doesn't work). My current pipeline is: 
+
+1. Make changes to u-boot, commit, generate a patch, copy to meta-sunxi
+
+2. Clean bitbake state for the bootloader and run bitbake
+
+3. dd the deploy images to the sd-card
+
+4. Put on the sdcard and turn on the board
+
+This definitely involves a lot of mechanical steps which are getting quite annoying. For each defconfig changes, I need to do all of those things. 
+
+My idea was to: 
+
+1. Get the u-boot image using tftp and keep it on RAM
+
+2. Take the u-boot image from RAM and use the mmc command to reflash the sd card
+
+3. Put it on a script that runs every time u-boot starts
+
+4. If tftp fails, do nothing (it's important to add some kind of print if a new image is loaded, to signal in case tftp fails)
+
+Of course, the issue I'm having involves ethernet, so that is not going to work, buuuut I can try with my STM32 later. 
+
+I also wanted to run tests on the board. Thankfully, there's a tool for that: tbot! [1] 
+
+That looks so cool, I wonder if I can later make my own CI for u-boot using the boards I have :).
+
+> *_NOTE_* this post is being updated as I figure stuff out.
+
+# References 
+
+\[1] [tbot](https://tbot.tools/)