How to add unit tests (google test) to test my software for the STM32? I am unable to find/setup a 32bit toolchain.

which stm32 are you using?

its pretty commn around here, for people comming from high abstraction level OS/web developing frameworks to try and fail to code in object oriented for OSless stm32 (they end up painfully wrapping C based HAL in cpp classes).

I bookmark your question, because i want to know the usefullness of unit test in embedded firmware without a mcu simulator , i want to hear everyone else's saying about it

https://www.beningo.com/category/testing/

@Javier Muñoz​ I'm using the STM32F446RE, but that shouldn't be relevant to the setup of 32 bit unit testing.

My two cents about the usefulness of testing without mcu simulator: I use it to test the 'higher level' functions of my firmware. That way I am confident those functions are solid. this also helps to implement a good HAL.

@Pavel A.​ Interesting read, but It does not answer my problem:

I don't know how I can setup 32 bit unit tests, integrated in STM32CubeIDE/Eclipse.

I don't want to use docker (imo overkill for this), I prefer cygwin, but cygwin32 is no longer maintained, so what is a recommended way to do this in STM32CubeIDE?

Is your question asking how to set up the unit testing as a build configuration of an STM32 project? If so, I created a step by step guide to integrating GoogleTest directly into your STM32 projects.

Or is your question asking about how to set up a 32 bit compiler instead of a 64 bit compiler - perhaps because you want to unit test with the same bit-width as your 32 bit STM32? If so, ask yourself why this matters - what if you were developing for a 16 bit, or 8 bit target like the STM8? You wouldn't (and couldn't) compile your tests with a 16 or 8 bit compiler just to match the target. Especially you are testing "higher level" functions, the bit-width of the development PC shouldn't matter. Anywhere that, for example, an int must be guaranteed to be 32 bits wide should use the int_32t type anyway.

Unit tests are one of a number of testing stages that are recommended during embedded development. Other tests for architecture-specific bugs can be done separately. For example, in James Grenning's book Test Driven Development for Embedded C he describes a situation where the function strstr() passed unit tests on the PC but failed on the target, because the target's standard library had a bug in that function's implementation!

@cr.1​ You can get a 32-bit version of gcc from MinGW-64. The toolchain bundles have `i386` in the name instead of `x86_64`

If you use the tutorial posted by @Michael K​ above (using MinGW-64 inside MSYS2), you can use `pacman` to get the right compiler:

> `pacman -S mingw-w64-i386-toolchain`

Getting the right Windows gcc binaries cleared up most of my issues. However, I did have trouble finding `strlcpy()` (and `strlcat()`) which are not included in the Windows libraries. [The ARM gcc libraries have these built-in]. In the end I just mocked them along with the other unit-test mocks required.