Documentation Overview

What is Jumpstarter?

Jumpstarter is a project to enable Hardware in the Loop testing for Edge devices.

Embedded and Edge devices have been traditionally tested in a manual way, with a human operator. This is not scalable, and it is not suitable for CI/CD pipelines, i.e. GitHub CI, GitLab CI, Jenkins, (TekTon under development), etc.

In a modern development cycle we want to know that our software changes work well into our device hardware. We need to test the onboarding process, the software stack, the hardware, the updates and the interaction between all of them.

Why do I want it?

• I need my software to be tested in real hardware for every new pull/merge request to my project.

• I need my software to be tested for every new release or commit of my project.

• I want my software to be automatically tested in newer versions of the hardware.

• I have multiple variants of the hardware where my software needs to run, and I want to test them all.

• I want a hands-free operation of hardware in my development environment, i.e. I don’t want to manually flash images, reboot the DUT, insert usb sticks, manually interact with a bootloader, etc.

• What is it good for?: Integrating your hardware edge devices into your software CI/CD pipeline.

• What is it not good for?: Managing edge devices. Jumpstarter is not a device management tool, it is a testing tool.

• What is it not yet good for?: Measuring power consumption of your device in combination with your software. This is a feature that we are working on. This feature will enable you to get a power consumption report of your device in combination with your software, and will allow you to compare power consumption before and after your changes.

Where should I go next?