Category: IDE

Everything about IDEs

SNAP: Debugging for the Masses

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. 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.

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Link-Time Optimization and Debugging of Object-Oriented Programs on AVR MCUs

The featured image of this post is based on a picture by TheDigitalArtist on Pixabay.

Link-time optimization (LTO) is a very powerful compiler-optimization technique. As I noticed, it does not go very well together with debugging object-oriented programs under GCC, at least for AVR MCUs. I noticed that in the context of debugging an Arduino program, and it took me quite a while to figure out that LTO is the culprit.

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Burnt Fuses and Bricked MCUs

Featured image: Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay

One of the most confusing things, in particular for newcomers, are the AVR fuses. Worse, by setting the wrong fuse bits, you can “brick” your MCU, i.e., a normal ISP-programmer cannot talk to the MCU anymore. In this blog post, we will present tools that help you to set the fuse bits right. And if push comes to shove, that is the wrong fuses have been burnt, I tell you how to recover …

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Debugging(3): Debugging is Like Being the Detective in a Crime Movie Where You are Also the Murderer

Featured picture: OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay.

One has to add to the title (quoted from a tweet by Filipe Fortes) that the detective suffers from memory loss. Otherwise, the case could be solved easily. Similarly, with debugging: If I only knew what nasty things I have hidden in the source code, I could just remove them – but I simply do not know. In this blog post, we will have a look at what kind of tools one could use to find the skeletons hidden in the closet.

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