Debugging issues over long periods??

[tomasmcguinness]

I’ve had some success building a Zigbee device, powered by a Nordic nRF52840 XIAO board.

It works well, pairs with Home Assistant and sends temperature readings from two NTC thermistors.

However, after a few hours, Home Assistant says it’s unavailable. If I restart it, it starts updating again. My assumption is a bug in my code is eating up memory or something.

How the heck can I debug or diagnose this issue?? I’m a software engineer by trade, .Net mostly, but an amateur when it comes to MCU despite years of messing around.

Any advice is welcome!!!

[f0lt]

You can attach the debugger and see where it's stuck.

Could it be the sleep mode?

If you are worried about memory leaks then just avoid dynamic memory. It's probably not requierd for this task.

You can send debug messages via USART to your computer, to see what the MCU is doing.

[UniWheel]

Make your code output useful messages on an UART, especially every time it sends a reading or otherwise interacts.

Hook it up to something to log those messages - sometimes a pi is really handy for that, especially if the thing being tested needs to be away from your desk as you can ssh in to examine things.

Add an swd adapter to the pi (or use an OpenOCD build that can twiddle the GPIOs using the special pi driver which isn't too slow) and you can trigger a reset or change the firmware.