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Writing firmware may be hard, but building hardware to run that firmware is often harder. A common problem is being unsure if an external IC is connected properly, since functionality is hard to test with just electrical bench tools. This can be helped from the firmware side with ‘smoke tests’: projects that engage an IC with as little user input as possible. These would differ from the actual board firmware project in that they they don’t implement any logic, they just do a bunch of stuff.
Not that for these to be useful, instructions should be included for the hardware team members using the project, including an overview of the expected behaviour as well as what each parameter does. If writing the instructions as comments proves unwieldy, add a confluence page under this one with instructions and a comment in the code to see confluence for instructions.
Some examples of what a smoke test might do are as follows:
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IC list to write smoke tests for
BMS Carrier
ADT7470 via I2C
BMS AFEs
LTC6811 via SPI
ADG731 via LTC6811 via SPI
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