Sensors and virtual environment

Renode enables you to manipulate virtual environmental conditions like Temperature and Humidity for sensors in the emulation. Sensors can be either controlled individually by directly setting their values (in the simple use case) or globally using an Environment medium (in order to implement scenarios with multiple sensors reading consistent virtual environmental conditions).

Controlling individual sensors

To control an individual sensor in your Renode machine, you need to access the appropriate property available to the sensor. To change the Temperature property of a sensor, use:

(machine-0) spi0.temperatureSensor Temperature 36.6

This value can then be read by accessing the same property::

(machine-0) spi0.temperatureSensor Temperature
36.6

Controlling sensors globally

For more advanced use cases, Renode offers the Environment object, which is an abstract medium representing a space with physical properties. It allows you to group and manage sensors that should observe the same environmental conditions.

Creating an environment

To create an environment called env, execute:

(monitor) emulation CreateEnvironment "env"

You can create multiple environments as needed. Currently, Environment supports two parameters: temperature and pressure.

You can set the temperature in the environment by calling:

(monitor) env Temperature 36.6

To check the current setting:

(monitor) env Temperature
36.6

Adding sensors to an environment

There are two ways of adding sensors to an environment:

• add a single sensor from a machine,

• add a machine to an environment.

You have to be in a machine context to be able to execute the following commands.

Adding a single sensor

To add the temperatureSensor peripheral, connected via the i2c bus, run:

(machine-0) i2c.temperatureSensor SetEnvironment env

Only the specified sensor will be added to the env environment and will observe the temperature value of that environment.

Adding a machine

To add the current machine to the environment, run:

(machine-0) machine SetEnvironment env

This command will connect the machine and all of its sensors to the environment env. They will have the same temperature value as the environment.

Note

When connecting a machine to an environment, all its sensors that were previously connected to other environments will be reconnected as well.

Sensors added to an environment will be updated every time the environment changes. However, you can still set your own value on a specific sensor, and it will not be propagated to other sensors (until a change in the environment overrides this).