As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
(Maurice Wilkes, 1949, architect of one of the first stored-program computers)
The featured picture of this post was created by DALL-E.
Have you ever used an Arduino Mega 2560 (or a similar board) and, at some point in the development process, experienced the LED mysteriously stopping to blink, garbled text being printed, or funny artifacts appearing in pictures? And all that without any apparent reason or any error or warning message? If you want to know what is behind it and how to solve this problem, read on.
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The featured image of this blog post is based on a picture by Shawn Suttle on Pixabay.
What is a system view description (SVD)? What can it be used for? And what is the connection to AVR microcontrollers?
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The featured picture of this blog post is by WikimediaImages on pixabay.
One typical debugging activity is setting breakpoints and then running the program from breakpoint to breakpoint, inspecting the program’s internal state at each breakpoint. While this sounds simple, it gets complicated when one looks behind the curtain, which we will do in this blog post.
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The featured picture of this post has been created by DALL-E.
Microchip recently lowered the price for its hardware debugger SNAP from more than €50 to less than €20 €10. I have recently created the Python script dw-gdbserver for this and other hardware debuggers so that you can now use SNAP in the Arduino IDE 2 to debug classic ATtinys and small ATmegas. All in all, this is an affordable and care-free debugging solution for classic AVRs.
The featured picture of this post has been created by DALL-E.
It often happens in embedded debugging that you suddenly end up in the interrupt dispatch table while single-stepping through your code. Another unrelated problem is that sometimes, single steps can take an eternity. In this blog post, I address both issues and describe how to circumvent them in a gdbserver implementation.
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What is the purpose of the C++ qualifier volatile? What does it have to do with race conditions, and what are Heisenbugs?
Debugging classic AVRs in the Arduino IDE 2 is finally possible! It took a while to implement this feature, but now it is just a piece of cake to enable debugging and start using the debugger.
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The featured picture of this post has been generated by Dall-E.
Three years ago, I wrote a short blog post about AVR fuses and what to do when you brick your MCU by setting the wrong fuse. This included a lot of jumper wires. In order to get rid of the jumper wires, I decided recently to design an Arduino shield that supports resurrecting bricked MCUs.
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If you own several badges, cards, or tickets and would like to automatically publish the number of unused badges on the web in real-time, there is no off-the-shelf solution. This post describes how to build such an IoT system.
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