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 blog post is by rawpixel.com on Freepik.
AVR MCUs sometimes appear to restart without you having pressed the RESET button or any other obvious reason. Is that a sign of resilience or of looming danger? How can you find the root cause?
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The featured image of this blog post is based on vector graphics by captainvector at 123RF.
What keeps people from using a debugger? Well, it is mostly that one has initial costs in terms of setting up the debugging environment and of learning how to use the debugging tool. Hopefully, the next iteration of my hardware debugging tool dw-link, which is able to debug classic ATtinys and ATmegaX8s, will somewhat ease that burden, in particular, because you can buy the accompanying hardware now at Tindie.
Another xkcd comic that hits the spot. Except, with my new hardware debugger, this is the past 😎. Recently, I debugged one of my electronic geocaching gadgets and was positively surprised how easy it was to figure out ones own mistakes and to come up with the right fix.
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The featured image of this post is based on a picture by Florian-if published on Wikipedia under CC-BY-SA-3.0
Is it possible to build a hardware debugger for debugWIRE for less than €10? As it turns out, it is. You just have to make a few compromises and also do a bit of soldering and gluing.
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dw-link can turn your Arduino board into a hardware debugger, and dw-probe connects it to any target board.
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As mentioned in an earlier blog post this year, hardware debuggers are the premier class of embedded debugging tools. However, until today, there were only very few relatively expensive tools around supporting the debugWIRE interface that is used by the classic ATtinys and a few ATmega MCUs.
The good news is that now you can turn an Arduino UNO, Nano, or Pro Mini into a debugWIRE hardware debugger that communicates with avr-gdb, the AVR version of the GNU project debugger.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
This quote is very much to the point, in particular, when one starts to create overly complex implementations. Keep it simple, stupid!
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