Memfault Firmware SDK

Ship Firmware with Confidence.

More details about the Memfault platform itself, how it works, and step-by-step integration guides can be found here.

Getting Started

To see a demo of the type of data which can be collected before writing any code, check out https://try.memfault.com.

To start integrating in your platform today, create a Memfault cloud account.

Components

The SDK is designed as a collection of components, so you can include only what is needed for your project. The SDK has been designed to have minimal impact on code-space, bandwidth, and power consumption.

The components directory folder contains the various components of the SDK. Each component contains a README.md, source code, header files and "platform" header files.

The platform header files describe the interfaces which the component relies on that you must implement.

For some of the platform dependencies we have provided ports that can be linked into your system without modification. You can find them in the ports folder.

For some of the popular MCUs & vendor SDKs, we have already provided a reference implementation for platform dependencies which can be found in the examples folder. These can also serve as a good example when initially setting up the SDK on your platform.

Main components

• panics – fault handling, coredump and reboot tracking and reboot loop detection API.
• metrics - used to monitor device health over time (i.e. connectivity, battery life, MCU resource utilization, hardware degradation, etc.)

Please refer to the README.md in each of these for more details.

Support components

• core – common code that is used by all other components.
• demo - common code that is used by demo apps for the various platforms.
• http – http client API, to post coredumps and events directly to the Memfault service from devices.
• util – various utilities.

Integrating the Memfault SDK

Add Memfault SDK to Your Repository

The Memfault SDK can be added directly into your repository. The structure typically looks like:

<YOUR_PROJECT>
├── third_party/memfault
│               ├── memfault-firmware-sdk (submodule)
│               │
│               │ # Files where port to your platform will be implemented
│               ├── memfault_platform_port.c
│               ├── memfault_platform_coredump_regions.c
│               │
│               │ # Configuration headers
│               ├── memfault_platform_config.h
│               ├── memfault_trace_reason_user_config.def
│               ├── memfault_metrics_heartbeat_config.def
│               └── memfault_platform_log_config.h

If you are using git, the Memfault SDK is typically added to a project as a submodule:

$ git submodule add [email protected]:memfault/memfault-firmware-sdk.git $YOUR_PROJECT/third_party/memfault/memfault-firmware-sdk

This makes it easy to track the history of the Memfault SDK. You should not need to make modifications to the Memfault SDK. The typical update flow is:

• git pull the latest upstream
• check CHANGES.md to see if any modifications are needed
• update to the new submodule commit in your repo.

Alternatively, the Memfault SDK may be added to a project as a git subtree or by copying the source into a project.

Add sources to Build System

Make

If you are using make, makefiles/MemfaultWorker.mk can be used to very easily collect the source files and include paths required by the SDK.

MEMFAULT_SDK_ROOT := <The to the root of this repo from your project>
MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS := <The SDK components to be used, i.e "core util">
include $(MEMFAULT_SDK_ROOT)/makefiles/MemfaultWorker.mk
<YOUR_SRC_FILES> += $(MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS_SRCS)
<YOUR_INCLUDE_PATHS> += $(MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS_INC_FOLDERS)

Cmake

If you are using cmake, cmake/Memfault.cmake in a similar fashion to collection source files and include paths:

set(MEMFAULT_SDK_ROOT <The path to the root of the memfault-firmware-sdk repo>)
list(APPEND MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS <The SDK components to be used, i.e "core util">)
include(${MEMFAULT_SDK_ROOT}/cmake/Memfault.cmake)
memfault_library(${MEMFAULT_SDK_ROOT} MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS
 MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS_SRCS MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS_INC_FOLDERS)

# ${MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS_SRCS} contains the sources
# needed for the library and ${MEMFAULT_COMPONENTS_INC_FOLDERS} contains the include paths

Other Build Systems

If you are not using one of the above build systems, to include the SDK you need to do is:

• Add the .c files located at components/<component>/src/*.c to your build system
• Add components/<component>/include to the include paths you pass to the compiler

Running the unit tests

The SDK code is covered extensively by unit tests. They can be found in the tests/ folder. If you'd like to run them yourself, make sure you have CPPUTest installed. When using macOS, you can install it from homebrew by running brew install cpputest.

To build and run the unit tests, just run

$ invoke test

To learn more about unit testing best practices for firmware development, check out our blog post on this topic!

The unit tests are run by CircleCI upon every commit to this repo. See badges at the top for build & test coverage status of the master branch.

FAQ

• Why does a coredump not show up under "Issues" after uploading it?

  • Make sure to upload the symbols to the same project to which you upload coredumps. Also make sure the software type and software version reported by the device (see "Device information" in components/core/README.md) match the software type and software version that was entered when creating the Software Version and symbol artifact online. More information on creating Software Versions and uploading symbols can be found here.

• I'm getting error XYZ, what to do now?

  • Don't hesitate to contact us for help! You can reach us through [email protected].