Firmware Fundamentals — question 4 of 10
Write a real answer. It is graded against the question's rubric, and the mastery movement is computed by the same engine the product uses. Scoring here is deterministic rather than model-written, so this page costs nothing to run and nothing is saved. In a track built from your own posting, the same rubric is graded by the model, which is what produces feedback about your reasoning rather than about coverage.
You write a Python script that sends a query over a serial port to a bench multimeter and reads back a line like 'VOLT +1.234E+00\r\n', parses out the float, and logs it in a loop for an overnight test. A few times per thousand readings, the parse throws an exception or returns a garbage value. Before you patch it with a try/except, how do you actually find the root cause, and what's your leading suspicion going in?