T
treez
Guest
Hello,
If some software is supposed to do some action 100 days (or so) after being started (ie the microcontroller being powered up) , then how can you test that this action will really happen? (without having to wait for 100 days of software testing to elapse)? :-|
..We have an offline lamp which has dimming software inside it. It is a lamp for people with large gardens. It dims itself as dawn approaches so as to save energy, ..just before it turns off at dawn, it has already dimmed well down (because its getting lighter as dawn approaches). It uses its software in order to gauge the likely duration of darkness in any given night.
No prizes for guessing how this is done…it simply times the time between the light sensor output changing rapidly either up (for approaching dawn), or down (for approaching dusk). It then averages this time over a few nights to gauge what the darkness time duration will be for the next-to-come night. This is the well known “night time length forecaster”, very very well known throughout the world of lighting. :clap:
(obviously you cannot just use a cheap light sensor to gauge the exact darkness level, because light sensors are ridiculously wide in their tolerance).
The lamp also gradually uses more led current as time goes on, in order to counteract the fact that leds naturally get dimmer as time goes on.
We are worried that the software engineer (who lives 1000 miles away from us) has correctly coded these things…I mean, how are we supposed to know that the lamp will have adjusted its led current to the correct level in 1 years time?.. :shock: .i mean, how do you test for that before you ship the product? How do you know that the software that executes in 100 days time doesnt go wrong and just turn the lamp off for good?
Our software engineer says that its all very simple…and that we can do “accelerated life testing”. This is where he simply reduces the timer interval (in the code) by a factor of 100, so that we can test what would happen in 100 days time in just one day.
Is this right?...i mean, this kind of accelerated time testing is genuinely worthy?
If some software is supposed to do some action 100 days (or so) after being started (ie the microcontroller being powered up) , then how can you test that this action will really happen? (without having to wait for 100 days of software testing to elapse)? :-|
..We have an offline lamp which has dimming software inside it. It is a lamp for people with large gardens. It dims itself as dawn approaches so as to save energy, ..just before it turns off at dawn, it has already dimmed well down (because its getting lighter as dawn approaches). It uses its software in order to gauge the likely duration of darkness in any given night.
No prizes for guessing how this is done…it simply times the time between the light sensor output changing rapidly either up (for approaching dawn), or down (for approaching dusk). It then averages this time over a few nights to gauge what the darkness time duration will be for the next-to-come night. This is the well known “night time length forecaster”, very very well known throughout the world of lighting. :clap:
(obviously you cannot just use a cheap light sensor to gauge the exact darkness level, because light sensors are ridiculously wide in their tolerance).
The lamp also gradually uses more led current as time goes on, in order to counteract the fact that leds naturally get dimmer as time goes on.
We are worried that the software engineer (who lives 1000 miles away from us) has correctly coded these things…I mean, how are we supposed to know that the lamp will have adjusted its led current to the correct level in 1 years time?.. :shock: .i mean, how do you test for that before you ship the product? How do you know that the software that executes in 100 days time doesnt go wrong and just turn the lamp off for good?
Our software engineer says that its all very simple…and that we can do “accelerated life testing”. This is where he simply reduces the timer interval (in the code) by a factor of 100, so that we can test what would happen in 100 days time in just one day.
Is this right?...i mean, this kind of accelerated time testing is genuinely worthy?
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