Debugging tools are critical to quick and effective development. Without being able to peek under the hood at what’s really going on, it can be difficult to understand and solve problems. Those who live on the Arduino platform are probably well acquainted with using the serial port to debug, but it’s far from the only way. [JoaoLopesF] has coded the RemoteDebug tool for ESP platforms, and the results are impressive.
RemoteDebug does away with the serial interface entirely, instead using the ESP’s native wireless interface to send debug data over TCP/IP. It’s all handled over telnet, making it completely platform agnostic. By handling things over the WiFi connection, it negates issues with physical access, as well as hassles with cables and limited serial ports. It’s also of benefit to robotics projects, which no longer need a tether when debugging.
It comes with a similar set of features to [JoaoLopesF]’s earlier work, SerialDebug. Things like verbosity and timestamps are all built in, making it easy to get high-quality debug data without having to reinvent the wheel yourself. Video after the break.
Ah ha, nice one, more reason to choose the platform over others perhaps.
Thanks for posting this :-)
I have one of these and everytime I see an article like this it reminds me that I really need to play around with it.
When I started reading I thought “hmm telnet, sure makes sense, but what’s so special about this” but I continued reading and quickly found out about the bells and whistles that make it much more useful that any normal kind of printf. So in other words, this is some seriously useful library, one that I most certainly will be using in one of my projects some day soon.
I mention “soon” and not “immediately”, as I’m too attached (pun intended) to my serial cable/connection at the moment.
Thanks for posting!
For “esp platforms”, as long as those platforms are arduino and “debugging” as long as your code does not crash the underlying framework. Also reading description on github gave me an aneurysm – esp8266 for some reason is synonymous with nodemcu, boards with mcu’s and so on.
Raspberry pi zero with openOcd can be used as JTAG debugger. Even JTAG debugger can be cheap and wireless
i wanted to set up my esp for otg programming but then i realized that the code for that was eating most of my flash.
I’ve been working on a project called Acorns that embeds a Squirrel interpreter in an Arduino sketch, and a related project K4D(Kaithem for devices) that lets you upload code remotely via encrypted UDP, and view debug output in the web UI(Running on a pi or laptop, not the ESP itself).
This looks like it would be a useful way to remotely interact with that kind of app. Super cool hack!
It looks amazing :)
Would be really cool, though, if it connected to a gdb session over TCP.
hi, there’s a Web interface too at http://remotedebugapp.pluggable.biz/