And this is probably where I don't understand testing as well as what
> I should. For reasons that elude me, testing under an emulated piece
> of hardware is vastly different than testing it on the actual piece of
> hardware itself.
Yes.
The trick is to have a good abstraction layer reasonably close to the hardware. When you run tests on your development ("host") system, you use an implementation, which emulates the actual hardware, while an actual deployment of course maps the abstraction layer to the actual hardware.
I do have set of tests that I think bridges this gap. However, I don't
> have any idea if this does in fact brige the gap. And I even am more
> clueless on how to do the tests. This is because I'm required to
> program the debugger myself. However, there is no tutorial on how to
> go about doing it.
If you have an abstraction layer, you can write tests, which verify that your emulator and the actual hardware behaves in the same way. Once you're sure of that, you can use the emulator to perform automated testing on the host system, so you with some confidence can postpone testing on the target system.
Greetings,
Jacob