If you are used to coding with almost any modern tool except the Arduino IDE, you are probably accustomed to having on-chip debugging. Sometimes having that visibility inside the code makes all the difference for squashing bugs. But for the Arduino, most of us resort to just printing print statements in our code to observe behavior. When the code works, we take the print statements out. [JoaoLopesF] wanted something better. So he created an Arduino library and a desktop application that lets you have a little better window into your program’s execution.
To be honest, it isn’t really a debugger in the way you normally think of it. But it does offer several nice features. The most rudimentary is to provide levels of messaging so you can filter out messages you don’t care about. This is sort of like a server’s log severity system. Some messages are warnings and some are informational, and some are verbose. You can select what messages to see.
In addition, the library timestamps the messages so you can tell how much time elapsed between messages and what function you were in during the message. It can also examine and set global variables that you preconfigure and set watches on variables. It is also possible to call functions from the serial monitor.
Continue reading “Debugging Arduino Is Painful: This Can Help”