Testing and validation of UART using cloud based GUI

Setting up of a communication protocol between two electronic devices is of vital importance in any embedded system. Testing and validation of such a protocol would imply the proper functioning of the system. In many scenarios mobility and distance between the System Under Test (SUT) and the test engineer is an impediment to be considered. The solution to such a problem is wireless testing. The Objective of this paper is to develop a wireless system for communication protocol testing and validation. The end product includes a test device consisting of probes for real time signal probing and measurement along with a Cloud supported web application with Graphical User Interface(GUI) for displaying the signals. The hardware board was able to sample the signal at a maximum of 400 kilo samples per second and was able to publish the data with a depth of 512 bytes on the MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transportation) broker which forwarded it to the cloud. To implement the system TI-CC3200 Simplelink Wi-fi board along with IBM bluemix cloud based Node RED application were used. This testing and validation of signals using cloud based GUI can be extended to many industrial and medical applications for real time signal probing and measurement.