How to build OpenOCD with Stellaris Launchpad support

The stable version of OpenOCD (an open source On-Chip Debugging software package) doesn’t have support for the ICDI protocol used by the Stellaris Launchpad board. But it is pretty easy to build your own OpenOCD from source after patching it to use the protocol.

We’ve already seen an open source tool used to flash binary images to the TI Read the rest

Debugging the Stellaris with OpenOCD

It looks as though Texas Instruments are really reaching out to the hacker community with their new ARM-powered Stellaris dev board. On the Stellarisiti forums, a member asked about the debugging options for the Stellaris board. The Stellaris already features an In-Circuit Debug Interface (ICDI), but unfortunately it’s a little hard to get working in Linux-ey environments.

One of the … Read the rest

Beginner’s look at On-Chip Debugging

As your embedded applications get more complicated an On-Chip Debugger will save you a lot of time when things don’t run quite right. On-Chip Debugging (OCD) is just what it sounds like — a way to run your program on the target chip that lets you pause execution to examine values and change them if need be. The Arduino has … Read the rest

iOS terminal debugging tool

This is a simple iOS debugging tool that will take no time to solder together. There’s even a chance that you already have everything you need on hand. The hack simply connects an RS232-to-USB converter to a breakout board for an iPod connector.

The hardware is aimed not at stock iOS systems, but as an aid to those who wish … Read the rest

ARM-based debugging tool aims to improve on the Bus Pirate performance

The Bus Pirate is a fantastic development tool. It does an amazing job at a lot of different things. And as it has matured, community support has driven it to new areas beyond the original design. This is where its hardware holds back performance a little bit. For instance, as an I2C or SPI sniffer it has limited capture speed. … Read the rest

Using printf-style output to debug Arduino

First off, if you’re looking at that title and thinking it’s flame-bait, please hold off. What [Ihsan Kehribar] is working with is another way to get some feedback for what’s going on with your Arduino project. Or really any AVR project that uses an ISP connection. He’s added text output for AVR programs similar to the printf function used for … Read the rest

Making the case for in-circuit debugging tools

in_circuit_debugging_of_pic_microcontrollers

If you are in the market for a PIC microcontroller programmer, you may want to consider a model with an In-Circuit Debugger (ICD). [Rajendra] put together a great tutorial on using an ICD when debugging PIC firmware, which makes a pretty convincing argument for owning one.

In his tutorial, he happens to be using a MikroElektronika PICflash2, but he says … Read the rest