TGP Device Farm Documentation

The TGP Device Farm is a hardware agnostic board farm that provides interactive and automated remote access to a lab of embedded devices through a ‘hardware on desk’ experience. This allows for the sharing of hardware and enables hardware-in-loop automated testing.

Features

The TGP Device Farm has the following features:

• ‘Hardware on Desk’ experience
  • Per user Virtual Machine for interactive access
  • Direct, abstraction free access to hardware via PCI USB passthrough (giving access to means of device sensing and manipulation)
• CI Access
  • GitHub ‘Self-hosted’ runner integration (which deploys transient VMs)
  • KernelCI, LAVA use-cases can be supported
• Controlled Access to Hardware
  • ‘bfmc’ utility is used to list, request, and release devices
• Agnostic to device types
  • All sensing and manipulation of devices is performed at a physical level, without the need to install or configure software running on the hardware device
• Lightweight management
  • The TGP Device Farm software stack is minimal
  • No software support is required for new forms of sensing/manipulation as farm is agnostic to this

• Security isolation between users / devices

• Network isolation between users / devices
  • With VPN access that allows for direct network access to the device as well as the VM

• Reliable and scalable

• The TGP Device Farm can be hosted by TGP or it’s software licensed

• The TGP Device Farm currently supports sensing/manipulation which includes:
  • Access to serial ports
  • Control of DC power
  • Control of SD card (allowing to switch between connection with VM or device)
  • Control of DIP switches and buttons