Have you ever wondered if you could use the AVR debug probe you found in your Grandpa’s spare parts box to debug your latest hardware project? Here comes the comprehensive list of AVR debug probes, which will answer such questions.
Continue readingTag: Atmel-ICE
That’s One Small Step for a Man, One Giant Leap for a Debugger: On Single-Stepping and Interrupts
You want to make a single step in your program, but the debugger takes you to some unknown area of the program. This was, in fact, my first experience when I tried out Microchip’s MPLAB X IDE debugger on the innocent blinking sketch. Is this a bug or a feature?
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Surprise, Surprise!
When you develop a tool for a protocol that is undocumented, it is not surprising that you will encounter situations you will not have be anticipated. This was exactly what I experienced developing the hardware debugger dw-link, which connects debugWIRE MCUs to the GDB debugger. Although a substantial part of the debugWIRE protocol has been reverse-engineered, I encountered plenty of surprising situations: Split personality MCUs, stuck-at-one bits in program counters, secret I/O addresses, half-legal opcodes, and more.
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How Many Programmers Do You Need …?
… to screw in a lightbulb? The correct answer to this question is: “None, this is a hardware problem!” But then, this is not the right question! The right question is: “How many ISP programmers do you need to burn a program into flash memory?”
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Debugging(3): Debugging is Like Being the Detective in a Crime Movie Where You are Also the Murderer
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.
Unfreeze Your Atmel-ICE
Avrdude is the workhorse for programming AVR chips from Atmel (now Microchip). It works flawlessly on all platforms with a huge number of different programmers. There are a few exceptions, though. The Atmel-ICE, a very decent programmer and debugger, could not be used under macOS (>10.13). But finally there seems to be light …