Tag: MPLAB X

SNAP: Debugging for the Masses

April 16, 2025 / nebel / 1 Comment

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.

That’s One Small Step for a Man, One Giant Leap for a Debugger: On Single-Stepping and Interrupts

January 2, 2022 / nebel / 0 Comments

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?

Surprise, Surprise!

December 29, 2021 / nebel / 4 Comments

The featured image of this post is by Albert Guillaume – Gils Blas, 24 décembre 1895, Public Domain, Link

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.

Burnt Fuses and Bricked MCUs

July 21, 2021 / nebel / 0 Comments

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 …

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

July 19, 2021 / nebel / 0 Comments

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.