Hardware testing is rather obscure topic among #makers crowd. Most projects are born on a bench and stay there or move into a box. If you ever done some serious software engineering, you probably heard about software testing.

How about doing hardware unit test... in Python?

We made a small example where we explore MCP7940N RTC by writing a test for it. Test verifies:

1. our wiring and I2C communication
2. RTC response (using programmable Alarm and Arduino DIO port)

This example may look trivial, but it opens few interesting opportunities, like testing maximum bus wire length, temperature range, power supply voltage, etc.

You can find it on our project page: https://iobtoolkit.com/s/hwtest/