Automated BoardFarm: Only Better with Bacon

In this presentation, we will introduce the concept of a BoardFarm, a tool to aid in the development and support of embedded systems. Timesys had an opportunity to save time and energy that was being spent juggling a limited number of embedded boards among our developers, customers, and support staff who are spread throughout the world. We decided to build a system to provide remote access to the boards and to automate many of the tedious tasks such as running tests, booting the boards and installing software including the operating systems, board support packages and toolchains. This allows the developers and support gurus at Timesys to concentrate on the problem at hand instead of how each board boots or how a specific board needs to be set up.

We will talk about why the BoardFarm was built, how to use it, how it works, and what it's being used for. We will also talk about ideas that we have for future improvements. Pigs were harmed in the making of this BoardFarm and were delicious.