Development of a fault injection system to test a weather station based on rapid prototyping platform

Fault injection has been an important mechanism to test the dependability properties of a system. Through this mechanism, it is possible to analyze the behavior of a computer program in case of anomalies and to obtain useful statistics to measure the effectiveness of techniques for fault tolerance. In areas such as telecommunications, aviation and finance, the use of fault tolerance is a common practice, although, in the development of simple embedded systems it usually does not occur. Due to this reason, there is a need to create tools for non-invasive tests that allow simulating faults without dramatically increasing the system complexity. This article presents some of the techniques often used to impose fault tolerance and describes a system developed for fault injection, which operates by inserting faults in certain memory regions to change the data and to cause crashes in a rapid prototyping platform for microcontrollers. At the end of this article the results are presented.