Skip to content

Alteriom HIL Rig

A hardware-in-the-loop rig for ESP32 firmware: a Raspberry Pi, a powered USB hub and a handful of dev boards that flash the firmware your CI built, run your test suite against real silicon, and keep the evidence. It works on its own, on your bench, with its own dashboard; it can also connect to a farm and take work from there.

The rig's dashboard: its boards, its last seven days and the run in progress

  • Getting started — from a box of parts to the first green health check, in about an hour.
  • Projects and your CI — how the rig gets your firmware and runs your suite: the project, the bundle, the workflow, the example.
  • The dashboard — what every page shows and what it is for, and a tour of it in pictures.
  • API reference — every route the rig answers.

What it is

How a rig works: your CI builds a bundle, the rig flashes the boards, runs your suite and answers with a verdict

  • A rig runs the projects you give it and no other. A project is a GitHub repository: the rig checks it out for each run, flashes the bundle its CI built, runs its pytest suite over the boards, and keeps the run as evidence — logs, serial captures, JUnit, a report.
  • The rig does not build firmware. Your CI does, the way it already does, and hands the bundle over — or the rig fetches it from GitHub, which is how a rig on a home LAN, reachable by no CI, still gets its firmware.
  • It proves its own hardware first. The Rig Health Check flashes every board with a small firmware of its own and asks each one: do you boot, is your serial path clean, does your flash keep a value, can I reset you, do you see my network. A red health check is never your regression.
  • GitHub is where projects come from. A rig without a GitHub token can add no project; with one — a fine-grained token that reads your repositories and their Actions artifacts — adding a project is pasting its URL.
  • Standalone first, connected when you want. The rig's dashboard is the rig's. Connecting it to a farm gives it a page there too, the same page, and lets the farm hand it runs.

Where things are
The rig software Alteriom/esp32-rig — releases are two wheels, the dashboard bundle and the pinned health check firmware
The health check firmware Alteriom/esp32-hil-firmware — its own repository, its own releases; the rig pins one
An example project Alteriom/esp32-rig-example — the smallest project a rig can run, with the workflow that builds its bundle
The reference project painlessMesh — the mesh library this rig was built to validate; ships with the rig, removable

Apache-2.0. Issues and pull requests on the repository.