debugger

31 Articles

Screenshot of debugging the Wokwi Arduino simulator

Digging Into An ATtiny Simulator Bug With GDB

August 26, 2021 by 5 Comments

Being able to track down a bug in a mountain of source code is a skill in its own right, and it’s a hard skill to learn from a book or online tutorial. Besides the trial-by-fire of learning while debugging your own project, the next best thing is to observe someone else’s process. [Uri Shaked] has given us a great opportunity to brush up on our debugging skills, as he demonstrates how to track down and squish a bug in the Wokwi Arduino simulator.

A user was kind enough to report the bug and include the offending Arduino sketch. [Uri]’s first step was to reduce the sketch to the smallest possible program that would still produce the bug.

Once a minimal program had been produced, it was time to check whether the problem was in one of the Arduino libraries or in the Wokwi simulator. [Uri] compiled the sketch, loaded it onto a ATtiny85, and compared the behavior of the simulator and the real thing. It turns out the code ran just fine on a physical ATtiny, so the problem must have been in the Arduino simulator itself.

To track down the bug in the simulator, [Uri] decided to break out the big gun—GDB. What follows is an excellent demonstration of how to use GDB to isolate a problem by examining the source code and using breakpoints and print statements. In the end, [Uri] managed to isolate the problem to a mis-placed bit in the simulation of the timer/counter interrupt flag register.

If you’d like to see more of [Uri]’s debugging prowess, check out his dive into an ATtiny’s write protection and configuration fuses. If you’ve been wowed by the power of GDB and want to learn more, check out this quick tutorial!

Continue reading “Digging Into An ATtiny Simulator Bug With GDB” →

Debugging For Sed — No Kidding

April 24, 2020 by 13 Comments

If you do much Linux shell scripting, you’ve probably encountered sed — the stream editor — in an example. Maybe you’ve even used it yourself. If all you want to do is substitute text, it is easy and efficient. But if you try to do really elaborate editing, it is often difficult to get things right. The syntax is cryptic and the documentation is lacking. But thanks to [SoptikHa2] you can now debug sed scripts with a text-based GUI debugger. Seriously.

According to the author, the program has several notable features:

  • Preview variable values, both of them!
  • See how will a substitute command affect pattern space before it runs
  • Step through sed script – both forward and backward!
  • Place breakpoints and examine program state
  • Hot reload and see what changes as you edit source code
  • Its name is a palindrome

There’s only one word for that last feature: wow.

Continue reading “Debugging For Sed — No Kidding” →

Z80 Computer Is Both Arduino And Shield

March 7, 2020 by 7 Comments

There have been plenty of Z80 computer builds here on Hackaday, but what sets them apart is what you do with them. [Andrew] writes in with his Z80 single-board computer made from scratch, using the Arduino standard headers for its I/O. In turn, since he needed an easy way to program the flash memory which holds the software to run on the Z80, he used an Arduino Mega as a debugger, making the SBC an Arduino shield itself.

Using such a common header pinout for the Z80 computer allows it to be used with a variety of readily-available Arduino shields. This compatibility is achieved with an analog-digital converter and a 3.3 V regulator, mimicking the pins found in an Arduino Uno. The code, available on GitHub, includes an extensive explanation and walkthrough over the process in which the Mega takes over the bus from the Z80 to function as a fully-featured debugger. Programs can be loaded through embedding an assembly listing into the Mega’s sketch, or, once the debugger is up you can also upload a compiled hex file through the serial connection.

This isn’t the first time [Andrew] has been featured here, and his past projects are just as interesting. If you need to translate a Soviet-era calculator’s buttons into English, hack a metallurgical microscope or even investigate what’s that Clacking Clanking Scraping Sound, he’s the one you should call.

Debug Superpowers Bring An STM32 Back From The Dead

August 26, 2019 by 5 Comments

When a processor has a fault it can leave what looks to be precious little in the way of cause and effect. Debug-by-print-statement works surprisingly well in simple cases, but where in a desktop environment you would drop into a debugger to solve trickier problems this can be an onerous task on an embedded system. [Ross Schlaikjer]’s excellent blog post walks through setting up one of our favorite Open Hardware debug probes and shows us that with the right tooling in place, unexpected faults aren’t quite so impenetrable. Continue reading “Debug Superpowers Bring An STM32 Back From The Dead” →

Examine Source Code To Assembly Mapping With PenguinTrace

May 9, 2019 by 23 Comments

C-programmers who don’t have a mental model of what’s going on underneath their thin veneer of abstraction above assembly code are destined for trouble. In order to provide a convenient way to understand what C-code gets compiled to and how it runs on the machine, [Alex Beharrell] has created penguinTrace, a program which allows you to see what instructions your code compiles to, and examine how it executes.

While you can get somewhat similar functionality out of standard debuggers, penguinTrace was purpose-built to facilitate exploration of how the whole process works. You can single-step through the instructions your code compiled to, examine variables, and look at the stack — the usual debugger stuff — but structured more for exploration and learning than full-on debugging. Based on our experiences when we learned low-level programming, anything that can help novices build that all-important mental picture of what’s going on underneath is a good thing. But, since it was written with a secondary purpose of learning how debuggers themselves work, it’s a great opportunity for exploring that space, too.

The UI harnesses CodeMirror to provide a browser-based interface, and is configurable to use Clang or GCC for compilation. It supports AMD64/X86-64 and AArch64 architectures, and will run on Windows using WSL: if you’ve got a PC running Linux, a Raspberry Pi, or a Windows box, you’re good to go. The code is AGPL-licensed and available on GitHub. So, if you want to gain a better understanding of what happens when you compile and run “hello, world,” grab a copy and start exploring.

This isn’t the only way to debug, though – we previously featured an application that allows a type of debugging for the Arduino platform.

 

 

“DB” = Abbreviated Microcontroller Debugging

December 20, 2018 by 19 Comments

We’ve all been there. When debugging a microcontroller project, we just want to put in a print statement to figure out what’s going on with the microcontroller in real time. However, advanced embedded programmers know that printf statements are verboten: they’re just too SLOW. While not fixing this plight entirely, [Atakan Sarioglu] has come up with a clever way to create readable debug messages with minimal runtime overhead.

[Atakan Sarioglu]’s innovation, called BigBug (Github), is a dynamically-generated codebook. The codebook translates abbreviated messages sent over serial (UART here) to longer-form human-readable messages. To generate the codebook, BigBug automatically parses your comments to create a lookup between an abbreviation and the long-form message. When you are running your program on the microcontroller, BigBug will translate the short codes to long messages in real-time as you send log/debug data over serial. Continue reading ““DB” = Abbreviated Microcontroller Debugging” →

Stepping Up Your Python Printf Debugging Game

February 12, 2018 by 4 Comments

Debuggers come in all shapes and sizes, offering a variety of options to track down your software problems and inspecting internal states at any given time. Yet some developers have a hard time breaking the habit of simply adding print statements into their code instead, performing manual work their tools could do for them. We say, to each their own — the best tools won’t be of much help if they are out of your comfort zone or work against your natural flow. Sometimes, a retrospective analysis using your custom-tailored debug output is just what you need to tackle an issue.

If the last part sounds familiar and your language of choice happens to be Python, [Alex Hall] created the Bird’s Eye Python debugger that records every expression inside a function and displays them interactively in a web browser. Every result, both partial and completed, and every value can then be inspected at any point inside each individual function call, turning this debugger into an educational tool along the way.

With a little bit of tweaking, the web interface can be made remote accessible, and for example, analyze code running on a Raspberry Pi. However, taking it further and using Bird’s Eye with MicroPython or CircuitPython would require more than just a little bit of tweaking, assuming there will be enough memory for it. Although it wouldn’t be first time that someone got creative and ran Python on a memory limited microcontroller.