Anyone who’s ever written more than a dozen or so lines of code knows that debugging is a part of life in our world. Anyone who’s written code for microcontrollers knows that physical debugging is a part of our life as well. Atmel processors use a serial communications protocol called debugWire, which is a simpler version of JTAG and allows full read/write access to all registers and allows one to single step, break, etc. [Nerd Ralph], a prominent fixture here at Hackaday has dug into the AVR debugWire protocol and enlightened us with some valuable information.

While the protocol side of debugWire is a mostly-solved problem, the physical layer was giving him trouble. He started with a diode, and then went through a couple resistors and other components to interface with the debugWire pin on the AVR microcontroller, doing most of the troubleshooting work so now you don’t have to. He notes that interface components might need to be tailored to specific USB-TTL adapters, so keep that in mind if you care to delve into working with debugWire yourself.

We’re no strangers to debugging techniques here at Hackaday. As always, be sure to let us know if you run across any new techniques or try anything new yourself!