Part 4: Setting up Renode, Qemu and FMPy

Renode is a development framework which accelerates IoT and embedded systems development by letting you simulate physical hardware systems - including both the CPU, peripherals, sensors, environment and wired or wireless medium between nodes. Read More from the official website.

The installation is pretty straightforward. As mentioned in the official website, let’s do the following:

Installing Renode

mkdir /tmp/renode_portable

cd /tmp/renode_portable

wget https://github.com/renode/renode/releases/download/v1.16.0/renode_1.16.0_amd64.deb

sudo apt install renode_1.16.0_amd64.deb

Once apt begins the installation, it will automatically install the dependencies and setup the PATH variables.
After apt finishes setting up the software, we can remove the /tmp folder.

sudo rm -rf /tmp/renode_portable

Setting up the Robot Testing Framework

We first navigate the location where Renode is installed, it is usually set up in /opt folder
Change Directory to /opt/renode

cd /opt/renode

Now in this directory, there is a sub directory named tests.

pip install -r tests/requirements.txt

This will install the requirements for Robot Test Framework.

Starting Renode

We can fire up renode by using the command:

renode

This will start the emulation, and a new console will pop-up, in that use the following command:

s @scripts/single-node/stm32f4_discovery.resc

This will download the STM32F4 image and start the firmware. Now, we have a properly working renode setup, along with CARLA and ROS.

Installing Qemu

Installing Qemu is pretty straight forward. We simply need to execute the following code:

sudo apt install qemu-system

That is it! Qemu is done installing.

Installing FMPy

FMPy is provided by PyPI as an installation package via pip. Therefore, to install it run the command:

python -m pip install fmpy[complete]

FMPy will begin installing on the system.

Starting FMPy

To check if the installation is successful we will execute the following:

python -m fmpy.gui

A new window should pop up and that is the FMPy interface.

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Thus, we have come to end of the installation and toolchain setup part! Thank you for accompanying this far in the journey. Next we’ll meet to discuss on using these tools and creating something productive.