Industry Insights Blog Series
The display on an e-bike, scooter, or any modern 2-wheeler vehicle is the rider's primary interface for communicating the most important information. Accurate speed, real-time battery status, visible turn signals, and reliable navigation are among the key bits for rider safety and trust.
Delivering this reliably across the diverse range of embedded processors used in the micro-mobility sector – from resource-constrained Microcontroller Units (MCUs) to more powerful Microprocessor Units (MPUs) and Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) – under demanding real-world conditions is a core engineering responsibility. Errors or failures don't just frustrate users; they can contribute to safety incidents, trigger costly recalls, and carry significant liability implications.
Testing Challenges Across the Hardware Spectrum
Developing and testing the 2-wheeler vehicle displays involves managing challenges and can be summarized into the following ones:
Safety functions: Incorrect speed displays, malfunctioning warning indicators, or navigation errors can directly impact rider safety. Comprehensive testing is essential to ensure reliability.
Demanding environments: Displays must function reliably across temperature extremes and accurately reflect real-time data from other vehicle systems (like BMS or motor controllers, often via CAN bus), all while coping with vibration and potential glare. Verifying these interactions manually is complex and often inadequate.
Intense market pressure: Teams face constant pressure to release new features and meet launch deadlines. This often compresses testing schedules, even as software complexity increases with connectivity and advanced graphics.
The regression testing bottleneck: As one engineer said, "Manual regression testing just couldn't keep up." Ensuring that firmware updates or new features don't break existing, safety-critical functionality is a slow, laborious manual process that frequently misses subtle but damaging bugs.
Microcontrollers and constraints:
Micro-mobility uses a broad spectrum of processing hardware.
1.) On the MCU side, developers cope with highly constrained environments, such as limited processing power (MHz) and memory (Kilobytes). For these systems, general-purpose automated test tools may introduce unacceptable overhead, potentially destabilizing the device or altering its real-time behavior, requiring lightweight, specialized solutions.
2.) While resources are greater on MPU/SoC platforms, challenges shift towards managing complex OSs, sophisticated graphics stacks, and ensuring performance alongside other processes. Efficient and accurate testing remains crucial.
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Test Automation Strategies
Why "Good Enough" Testing Tools Fall Short
Traditional testing methods struggle to address these combined challenges fully:
Manual testing: Too slow for rapid iteration and regression demands, prone to human error (missing intermittent bugs), challenging to scale, and often achieves incomplete coverage (40-70% is commonly seen for complex UIs).
Camera/Robot Rigs: These have high setup and maintenance costs (which can range from $10k to $50k+), are sensitive to physical alignment (calibration drift), struggle with visual variations like reflections, and cannot easily test internal logic or rapid state changes.
Simulation/Emulation: Valuable for early development, but cannot fully replicate the timing nuances, hardware limitations, or real-world peripheral interactions of the target device, whether MCU- or MPU-based.
Transitioning to GUI test automation, which is explicitly designed for the characteristic needs of embedded systems, offers a way to improve efficiency, coverage, and reliability compared to manual-centric methods. Solutions and tools like Squish allow teams to automate testing directly on target hardware, catching regressions earlier and increasing confidence in releases.
Automated GUI Testing Built for Embedded Hardware Systems
Squish provides automated GUI testing capabilities across the embedded spectrum. It supports platforms ranging from bare-metal and RTOS-based MCUs (often using Qt for MCUs or Qt Quick Ultralite) to embedded Linux systems (supporting frameworks like Qt6).
Squish enables automated GUI testing directly on the target hardware, integrating with development practices. Squish works with embedded Linux platforms with Qt6 as well as with bare metal and RTOS-based microcontroller platforms with Qt for MCUs.
Lightweight & On-Target
It's designed with embedded constraints in mind. For example, tested on MCU cores down to 8MHz, it's exceptionally lightweight and minimizes the impact on the systems. It offers reliable testing without overly interfering with the device's operation.
Reliable verification, sized for your hardware
For MCU displays: Squish sticks to pixels-accurate image- and OCR-based testing — no extra code weighing the chip.
For MPUs: On more capable processors (like MPUs with more memory and storage space), Squish also identifies object properties so that you can run more complex verifications besides visuals.
This means in-depth tests where you have headroom and lightweight tests where you don't.
Testing Complex Interactions
Test scripts (in Python, JavaScript, etc.) can drive interactions relevant to micro-mobility, such as simulating low battery modes or validating OTA update sequences. Interactions with other systems (e.g., verifying data displayed from CAN bus signals) can be tested, typically requiring appropriate test hooks or APIs within the firmware as part of the test setup.
CI/CD Integration
Crucial for tackling the regression bottleneck. Squish test execution can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines, allowing automated GUI tests to run alongside other checks on every code commit for immediate feedback.
Companies developing diverse embedded microprocessors and systems adopt Squish because it directly addresses persistent challenges: breaking regression testing bottlenecks, increasing test coverage under tight deadlines, and enabling reliable UI validation on actual target hardware. For the micro-mobility sector, the underlying need to ensure GUI quality and reliability under resource constraints is a common driver for turning to tools like Squish.
Next Steps
Inadequate testing shouldn't compromise rider safety or delay your product roadmap. If you need a more effective way to ensure the reliability of your micro-mobility displays while meeting demanding timelines, consider automated testing designed for the unique constraints of embedded systems hardware.
Discover how Squish can help your team ship safer products better and faster.
