Internet of Things (IoT) Boards

These are quick notes on using MCU/IoT level boards with LAVA.

Important

Make sure you have read Adding new device types first.

Arduino101

A separate serial connection means board can be reset without serial interruption, very good, saves all the timing issues of trying to reconnect to the serial line before the app starts.

The DFU utility has option to reset the board after flashing, so no need to use power control for that bit.

Working upstream zephyr binaries were available to support integration.

Cons

The device draws power from both the 5v header and the USB flashing port, so you need power control for USB and not use the 5v connector. Not a problem for the lab hubs but I had to make a usb power control solution for home.

FRDM-K64F

This was among the first CMSIS-DAP devices added to LAVA, and known to be generally well supported and stable. USB mass storage flashing needs no extra tools installed on the dispatcher.

Depending on the DAP firmware settings, the board resets after being flashed, or not. The USB mount and serial device go away and return. LAVA can use the serial device udev add action to know its safe to connect to serial. Connecting to the serial port also causes the app to restart, but cannot do that before flash is complete or the image can be corrupted.

While flashing via USB mass storage device is conceptually easy deployment method, experience across different kinds of host hardware showed that there may be variations in behavior and compatibility issues. Oftentimes, they can be worked around by a delay after flashing process, before proceeding to serial connection, etc. This delay can be controlled via the following setting in a device dictionary (for particular device):

{% block cmsis_dap_params %}
# cmsis-dap boot method params in YAML syntax
post_unmount_delay: 3
{% endblock cmsis_dap_params %}

Note that 3s is already applied safe default for this setting.

Cons

The serial device goes away when the board resets after flashing, so LAVA can only try and reconnect to serial as soon as udev sees it return. This means that LAVA can miss the first line of output due to this race condition. This race condition is a problem for all CMSIS devices.

After the integration was complete, this device was moved to use PyOCD to reset the app without the serial connection dropping.