Written by Michael Gielda, Zephyr Project Community Member and Business Development and Board Member for Antmicro
If you’re working with multi-node Internet of Things (IoT) systems, you probably have experienced problems related to testing, security, interoperability, reuse, lifecycle management, and code quality involved in building real-life networks.
To address these problems, new tools and workflows are needed that allow developers to collaborate around code more effectively. These tools and workflows must increase the test coverage and understanding of the software and protocols running on the devices that form the backbone of our homes, offices, factories, and cities, both now and in the future.
The open source Renode framework from Antmicro, which started a collaboration with the Zephyr project in 2017, is aimed at doing exactly that: Renode lets you simulate complex wireless (and wired) setups running real binaries so that you can do testing, continuous integration, and debugging to an extent that wasn’t possible before.
Sound promising? We hope it does. And it’s not as complex as it sounds. In this blog note, we’ll explain how Renode can help you in your daily development without forcing you to rewrite your software or abandon your familiar toolset.
Renode can simulate physical hardware systems – including the CPU, peripherals, sensors, environment, and wireless medium between nodes. Just develop your IoT software, including software based on the Zephyr RTOS (real-time operating system) using your familiar processes, and then use Renode to debug and test it in various circumstances. The tests includes protocols and applications that span multiple nodes. You can run them in a joint virtual environment with full determinism and control over the execution parameters.
For example, at the 2017 Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) Europe, the Renode and Zephyr teams jointly showcased a fairly complex simulated wireless setup. With nodes based on two architectures (x86 and ARM) and running two different RTOSes (Zephyr and Contiki), the demo showed how easy it is to perform interoperability testing with Renode.
In this note, we’d like to focus on how a simple multi-node setup can be reproduced from the comfort of your chair. This short tutorial can act as a starting point for your development with Renode and Zephyr.
- Installing Renode
The Renode framework is hosted on GitHub – https://github.com/renode/renode. You can use the README file to download and install it, but the easiest way to start is by downloading a binary release from https://github.com/renode/renode/releases. The precompiled packages are provided as deb and rpm packages for Linux, a dmg package for macOS, and a zip archive for Windows. - Starting Renode
This tutorial uses the Renode command line interface, which is one of many ways to interact with Renode. After installation, run the renode command. Alternatively, look for the Renode.exe binary. Once Renode is started, you will see two windows: one for Renode’s smart logger (you can control what’s being logged) and one for the command line interface (CLI) called the Monitor.
From this CLI window you can create and control the whole emulation environment. - Scripts
While you can type all commands interactively, it’s a good idea to group them into reusable Renode scripts, which typically have the .resc extension. The scripts can be used to load binaries, set starting conditions, prepare the environment, connect machines to the network, and other tasks.
This tutorial uses scripts available in the Renode package named: scripts/many-nodes/quark-c1000-zephyr/demo.resc and scripts/many-nodes/quark-c1000-zephyr/quark_c1000.resc. For details on the scripts, please review the commented files in the Renode installation directory. (For Linux, opt/renode/scripts is the default.) - Loading our setup
The tutorial setup consists of two Intel Quark C1000 nodes with a TI CC2520 radio connected via SPI. The nodes run applications based on Zephyr demos, an echo_server and an echo_client, compiled as normal for the target hardware. (The provided scripts use precompiled binaries hosted online, but you can provide your own binaries by changing the relevant $BIN variable in the scripts.)
In Renode, the nodes are assigned coordinates in a virtual 3D space. By manipulating the maximum range of the wireless medium or moving the nodes around, we can put them in or out of each other’s range, and form different topologies, building routing scenarios of various complexity. In this simple example, the nodes are within each other’s range and we won’t move them around or make them lose packets.
To run a script, use the include command (or i, for short), with a path to the script to load, prepended with the @ sign, like this:
include @scripts/many-nodes/quark-c1000-zephyr/demo.resc
After the script is loaded, you will see two new terminal windows. These are UART windows opened for each machine.
The emulation is now loaded, but not started. You can control it using start and pause and other commands that are described in the next section. - Simple commands
- Start and pause
To control whether the simulation is running, use start and pause. - Accessing peripherals
All peripherals are accessible in the Monitor, with most of their methods and properties exposed to the user. To list all available peripherals, use the peripherals command. - Peripheral methods and properties
To access a peripheral, you have to provide its path. All peripherals are registered in sysbus, so use sysbus.uartB to access the second UART or sysbus.spi1.radio to access the CC2520. The using sysbus command is used in most of the provided demos, allowing you to drop the sysbus. prefix. Typing a peripheral name gives you a list of available methods, fields, and properties. The list is automatically generated, and most of the accessible members are not designed for the end user. The list shows examples of correct Monitor syntax for each member type. - Other commands
To find information about built-in Monitor commands, type help and refer to the documentation. Running help prints out the help for the given command.
- Start and pause
- Debugging and inspection
Renode provides many ways to verify the behavior of your applications. Thanks to having full control over the environment, you can add logging, hooks on events, interactive code debugging, and more in a way that is completely transparent to the emulated application. Since this is a simple tutorial, only a few debugging options are listed below, however, many more are available.
We hope that this short tutorial will help you get started with Zephyr and Renode, which has recently become one of Zephyr’s recommended developer tools: https://www.zephyrproject.org/developers/developer-tools/.
In a future blog post we’ll continue this tutorial with details on more complex wireless setups – stay tuned!
RenodeTM is a software development framework from Antmicro, a technology company building software-driven IoT systems. If you need help with implementing your platforms and setups in Renode, adopting a Continuous Integration workflow inside your organization, integrating with your tools or building custom ones, or IoT system development services using the Renode methodology, please contact them at contact@renode.io.
