Simulation and Emulation
Every technique in the rest of this folder needs a board on the desk, or at minimum a physical binary running somewhere real. Unit Testing Firmware and Mocking Hardware sidestep that by pulling logic out from behind a seam and running it on the host — a deliberate, narrow substitute for one driver's register interface. Simulation is a different move entirely: instead of extracting the logic, it models the chip, and runs the actual, unmodified cross-compiled firmware.elf against that model — the same instruction stream, the same startup code, the same register pokes, executing against a virtual STM32 instead of a real one.