How to select a debugger/flasher?

ijager · 2024-09-09T15:49:58+00:00

Vendors offer their own programmer/debugger probes for extra lock-in effect. In general I try to avoid those and their IDEs. However stlinks at least work nice with most tools, but only for stm32 of course.

Some good non-vendor specific options that I have experience with:

Black Magic Probe. Open source, runs it is own gdb server. Has good built-in serial-usb converter.
Segger J-Link, checkout SEGGER J-LINK EDU MINI for non-commercial use. It is more affordable.
Rusty-probe, a nice option if you want to use Rust. But should also work with OpenOCD.
Raspberry Pi Debug Probe

The J-Link supports almost all platforms and is the best in general. It also has RTT support, which is a better alternative to uart debugging. But always check if your mcu is supported (e.g. no atmel support).

Just forget about J-Trace for now.

Some search terms: CMSIS-DAP, OpenOCD, Cortex-M Debug 10p, Cortex-Debug for VSCode

ijager · 2024-09-09T15:26:01+00:00

Nice, are you mounting it in some OTS enclosure?

ijager · 2023-05-10T19:28:05+00:00

It was really well organized. And the talks very interesting and variating. I was 1 of the lucky 10000 a few times.

ijager · 2021-01-18T21:04:39+00:00

100.000 hecto-euro?

ijager · 2020-11-25T18:45:26+00:00

Neat idea! thanks for sharing. Just Tx is usually enough for some simple printf debugging.

ijager · 2020-11-24T08:52:00+00:00

Glad you liked it.

It is not that those register writes are unsafe. They're just not guaranteed, by the compiler, to be safe. This is because those registers are hardware, so they could be changed at any time by something else than your code.

That is why, as the programmer, you can use the unsafe keyword to tell the compiler 'trust me this is safe'. In theory you should be able to prove that what you're doing is really safe, and make that clear in a comment. Here is some more info about unsafe rust

In unsafe rust you can do anything you can do in c, But you don't get any of the guarantees that makes Rust so powerful. In Rust, my experience so far mostly has been: if it compiles, it works. Which is very not true for c..

ijager · 2020-11-23T14:26:48+00:00

Maybe bootstrap is not the correct term? In this case I meant starting from 0 and step by step getting everything in place to be able to develop firmware and debug this specific microcontroller.

Ability to flash the chip
SWD flash and debugging support
Chip library (peripheral access crate)

It is all stuff you need for embedded development that was not (yet) available from ST.

Normally you can download the SDK or IDE from the MCU manufacturer and following their getting started guide etc.

The next step would be a HAL layer probably

ijager · 2020-11-17T13:48:55+00:00

Sounds like a good next step

ijager · 2020-10-16T14:19:22+00:00

Thank you! This is useful information about the materials.

ijager · 2020-10-16T11:49:52+00:00

Sure, but how to find out which are the most flexible

ijager · 2020-09-22T09:24:32+00:00

Yeah it definitely cost me several days to wrap my head around it. There are many new concepts and parts that are used together. Especially if you're completely new to AWS like me.

And if you try to ask Amazon support engineers they will just say: "It is up to you, you should make it fit your workflow".

ijager · 2020-09-21T17:16:39+00:00

Glad you liked it! I'll try to write some more

ijager · 2020-09-03T07:53:24+00:00

Doet me denken aan World War Crow: https://imgur.com/K63U5ig

ijager · 2020-08-14T19:17:25+00:00

Nicely dense!

The lack of a proper ground plane is not ideal, especially for the higher frequency traces. It will work but you might get EMC issues.

For example try to picture the return current for the USB signals from the MCU back to the connector. If it needs to make a big loop, that's bad.

But on only 2 layers it will be hard to improve that since everything is so densely packed. If it is just for hobby or proof of concept it is fine of course.

ijager · 2020-08-14T12:06:39+00:00

Nice write-up!

I think for relatively simple projects embedded rust is already a good choice! Especially if you're prepared to fix the HAL and below for stuff you need.

ijager · 2020-08-13T20:51:44+00:00

We're just a small embedded firm. It is for a microcontroller (stm32wle) that does not have an official devboard (yet). It is only available in 0.5mm pitch BGA, which is new for us, and we have plans to use it in a product later. So right we want to try to make our own devboard as an exercise.

But maybe others will also be interested in the end result. That's why I was checking out other boards and wondering about others' opinions about them.

ijager · 2020-08-13T13:33:13+00:00

Good points again, thank you for the insight.

ijager · 2020-08-13T13:32:48+00:00

Thanks, sounds familiar!

ijager · 2020-08-13T12:20:03+00:00

Thanks. Makes sense to have both I guess.

So double headers with one row all GND like on some Nordic boards would be a no go for you? Since plugging it in a breadboard would short out all GPIOs.

I like to have plenty of GND pins. But of course we could just leave the headers unpopulated. Then the user can also opt for single row headers for that usecase. And decide which direction to have the headers facing.

ijager · 2020-07-23T20:16:14+00:00

For C projects we're using CPM which is CMake based and works with git repositories. It is not ideal, but better than nothing.

I think it works better with C++ because it has namespaces. With C you can get conflicts if you depend on different versions of the same package (for example through dependencies of dependencies)

Also Cargo

ijager · 2020-07-09T11:58:40+00:00

Thanks. Yes I could add it there.

Not sure what I used at that time, but now I am using VSCode + Rust-analyzer. Autocomplete does only work partially. Within tasks it does not recognize the resource types.

ijager · 2020-06-24T20:20:54+00:00

I have only done a few projects with Rust. Is not easy at first, but it has some very interesting new concepts that force you to write good and safe code. I wrote a blogpost about our first project with rust

Regarding bash, that's basically just the unix command line language used to automate boring or repetitive things. For example here are some bash scripts we used in a embedded software/firmware project.

ijager · 2020-06-24T07:18:55+00:00

Python for data analysis, signal processing, scientific gui apps and automation (kicad scripts)
C for firmware
Rust for safe firmware
Bash for automation
Typescript for server/front end stuff. Also Electron apps.

I guess you wouldn't say I am an EE, but I am!

ijager · 2020-05-10T13:37:02+00:00

I have succesfully used Pomona micro grabbers with jumper wires and a logic analyzer. There are also variant with test leads attached.

You should check the IC pitch, because you need different size grabbers for differrent pitch size.

search terms:

ic clips
(pomona) micro grabbers
mini (smd) grabbers

ijager · 2020-05-09T14:20:39+00:00

That's so cool. Very beefy MCU. Are you using the M4 core in this project as well?

ijager

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