debugging

56 Articles

Crash Your Code – Lessons Learned From Debugging Things That Should Never Happen™

January 22, 2019 by 58 Comments

Let’s be honest, no one likes to see their program crash. It’s a clear sign that something is wrong with our code, and that’s a truth we don’t like to see. We try our best to avoid such a situation, and we’ve seen how compiler warnings and other static code analysis tools can help us to detect and prevent possible flaws in our code, which could otherwise lead to its demise. But what if I told you that crashing your program is actually a great way to improve its overall quality? Now, this obviously sounds a bit counterintuitive, after all we are talking about preventing our code from misbehaving, so why would we want to purposely break it?

Wandering around in an environment of ones and zeroes makes it easy to forget that reality is usually a lot less black and white. Yes, a program crash is bad — it hurts the ego, makes us look bad, and most of all, it is simply annoying. But is it really the worst that could happen? What if, say, some bad pointer handling doesn’t cause an instant segmentation fault, but instead happily introduces some garbage data to the system, widely opening the gates to virtually any outcome imaginable, from minor glitches to severe security vulnerabilities. Is this really a better option? And it doesn’t have to be pointers, or anything of C’s shortcomings in particular, we can end up with invalid data and unforeseen scenarios in virtually any language.

It doesn’t matter how often we hear that every piece of software is too complex to ever fully understand it, or how everything that can go wrong will go wrong. We are fully aware of all the wisdom and cliches, and completely ignore them or weasel our way out of it every time we put a /* this should never happen */ comment in our code.

So today, we are going to look into our options to deal with such unanticipated situations, how we can utilize a deliberate crash to improve our code in the future, and why the average error message is mostly useless.

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“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” →

Debugging Arduino Is Painful: This Can Help

November 7, 2018 by 27 Comments

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.

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Simulate PIC And Arduino/AVR Designs With No Cloud

August 22, 2018 by 17 Comments

I’ve always appreciated simulation tools. Sure, there’s no substitute for actually building a circuit but it sure is handy if you can fix a lot of easy problems before you start soldering and making PCBs. I’ve done quite a few posts on LTSpice and I’m also a big fan of the Falstad simulator in the browser. However, both of those don’t do a lot for you if a microcontroller is a major part of your design. I recently found an open source project called Simulide that has a few issues but does a credible job of mixed simulation. It allows you to simulate analog circuits, LCDs, stepper and servo motors and can include programmable PIC or AVR (including Arduino) processors in your simulation.

The software is available for Windows or Linux and the AVR/Arduino emulation is built in. For the PIC on Linux, you need an external software simulator that you can easily install. This is provided with the Windows version. You can see one of several videos available about an older release of the tool below. There is also a window that can compile your Arduino code and even debug it, although that almost always crashed for me after a few minutes of working. As you can see in the image above, though, it is capable of running some pretty serious Arduino code as long as you aren’t debugging.

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CortexProg Is A Real ARM-Twister

July 17, 2018 by 32 Comments

We’ve got a small box of microcontroller programmers on our desktop. AVR, PIC, and ARM, or at least the STMicro version of ARM. Why? Some program faster, some debug better, some have nicer cables, and others, well, we’re just sentimental about. Don’t judge.

[Dmitry Grinberg], on the other hand, is searching for the One Ring. Or at least the One Ring for ARM microcontrollers. You see, while all ARM chips have the same core, and thus the same SWD debugging interface, they all write to flash differently. So if you do ARM development with offerings from different chip vendors, you need to have a box full of programmers or shell out for an expensive J-Link. Until now.

[Dmitry] keeps his options open by loading up the flash-specific portion of the code as a plugin, which lets the programmer figure out what chip it’s dealing with and then lookup the appropriate block size and flash memory procedures. One Ring. He also implements a fast printf-style debugging aid that he calls “ZeroWire Trace” that we’d like to hear more about. Programming and debugging are scriptable in Lua, and it can do batch programming based on reading chip IDs.

You can build your own CortexProg from an ATtiny85, two diodes, and two current-limiting resistors: the standard V-USB setup. The downside of the DIY? Slow upload speed, but at least it’ll get you going. He’s also developed a number of fancier versions that improve on this. Version four of the hardware is just now up on Kickstarter, if you’re interested.

If you’re just using one vendor’s chips or don’t mind having a drawer full of programmers, you might also look into the Black Magic Probe. It embeds a GDB server in the debugger itself, which is both a cool trick and the reason that you have to re-flash the programmer to work with a different vendor’s chips. Since the BMP firmware is open, you can make your own for the cost of a sacrificial ST-Link clone, about $4.

On the other hand, if you want a programmer that works across chip families, is scriptable, and can do batch uploads, CortexProg looks like a caviar programmer on a fish-bait budget. We’re going to try one out soon.

Oh and if you think [Dmitry Grinberg] sounds familiar, you might like his sweet Dreamcast VRU hack, his investigations into the Cypress PSOCs, or his epic AVR-based Linux machine.

Exostiv FPGA Debugging Might Be A Bargain

June 30, 2018 by 23 Comments

Got $4,000 to spend? Even if you don’t, keep reading — especially if you develop with FPGAs. Exostiv’s FPGA debugging setup costs around $4K although if you are in need of debugging a complex FPGA design and your time has any value, that might not be very expensive. Then again, most of us have a lot of trouble justifying a $4,000 piece of test gear. But we wanted to think about what Exostiv is doing and why we don’t see more of it. Traditionally, debugging FPGAs meant using JTAG and possibly some custom blocks that act like a logic analyzer and chew up real estate on your device. Exostiv also uses some of your device, but instead of building a JTAG-communicating logic analyzer it… well, here’s what their website says:

EXOSTIV IP uses the MGTs (Multi-Gigabit Transceivers) to flow captured data out of the FPGA to an external memory. EXOSTIV IP supports repeating captures of up to 32,768 internal nodes simultaneously at the FPGA’s speed of operation (16 data sets x 2,048 bits).

EXOSTIV IP provides dynamic multiplexer controls to capture even more data sets without the need to recompile. Dynamic ON/OFF controls of data sets let you select the data set and preserve the MGT’s bandwidth for when deeper captures of a reduced set of data is required.

In a nutshell, this means they use high-speed communications to send raw data to a box that has memory and connects back to a PC. That means they can store more data, have more data come out of the chip over a certain time frame, and do sophisticated processing. You can see a video about the device below, and there are more detailed videos on their channel, as well.

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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.