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. 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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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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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 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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The featured image of this post is by WikiImages on Pixabay
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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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.
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