I'm developing firmware on a custom board and would like breakpoints and step-through debugging. I can't retroactively fit JTAG.
What's the best way to add breakpoint debugging in VSCode on Windows? I print general logs to the serial port and would like to retain that, if possible. The application is freertos-based. I've tried OpenOCD in the past but I don't at all find anything in VSCode intuitive, so need a bit of a "for-dummies" hand-holding here.
Currently printing logs to serial, it's effective only to a point...
The ESP32 requires a JTAG connection (and an adapter, e.g. ESP-Prog) for debugging.
Related
I have a custom ESP32-S2-based circuit board with USB-C which does not have a USB-serial converter IC like a common dev board might. On this board, USB(-) is on GPIO19, and USB(+) is on GPIO20. USB works great for powering the board and for uploading firmware.
The board works well and I have access to good old-fashioned serial console via a USB-to-logic level serial interface, but it would be nice to be able to get serial out to USB along with the firmware upload (like a dev board).
I’m using PlatformIO in Visual Studio Code, and writing with arduino-esp32 rather than ESP-IDF.
I understand by these instructions from Espressif that when using ESP-IDF I can configure log output to go to USB CDC rather than UART, and this has been done successfully on my custom board. But I would like to be able to do this without having to switch over to ESP-IDF.
I’m presuming that one of the partitions that PlatformIO is building for me is this configuration with some nice common sense defaults, but I can’t see how I might alter those defaults to do what I’m looking for.
Any thoughts or pointers?
I could program and debug this project for the first time. But the problem is that I can't reprogram or debug it again. There is no bootloader on the chip. The only way to communicate with this chip is SWD. As a debugger, I am using Atmel ice. The microchip is SAMD21E16B-U. The project is created by Atmel Start. Visual Studio is used as an IDE to import the project.
After debugging again, the error is:
The problem may be because of setup. I am not sure what I missed. I followed the visualGDB website for importing this project.
I checked the power connection.
There is no option for "connect under reset" on visualgdb debug setting. However, this option was available on STM chips.
I really appreciate it if you can guide me on what I can do for reprogramming this chip? Or which information I should look for. Thanks for any helpful recommendations, in advance.
The following steps solved my problems. I think erasing my chip was helpful to reprogram the chip. I am not sure which step exactly caused the error. But after these steps, I didn't get that error.
Choose the right chip: samd21e16b instead of samd21e16b-U (The first selection was based on a schematic. My schematic wasn't correct (look at the physical chips on our board or use a microchip studio. Microchip studio detected the right chip for me). I have selected an incorrect device while creating our project (e.g. Our device has different SRAM, Flash, and packages.)). Then, I needed to set up again and choose the right chip.
Erase the chip by microchip studio and was able to reprogram it. So, I am using microchip studio for erasing the chip and getting back to visual studio, and then reprogramming, or debugging it
Checked the power connection (connect the Vcc 3.3 by SWD connector and
make sure that the green light on Atmel ice is on before debugging (The green led on Atmel ice is showing that the chip power is ok and correct)
also, I should make sure that my chip is connected to pc by USB. It may be different in your chip to provide power)
I didn't change my debugger from Atmel ice to J-Link but it was a solution that the visualGDB (sysProgs) support team mentioned. I will only add their quotes briefly. It may be helpful for the ones who want to solve the problem by the visual studio and reset the chip. But I didn't change my debugger or didn't configure openOCD. I used microchip studio and reset the chip instead.
VisualGDB Support team: This looks like a device connectivity issue rather than something VisualGDB-specific. Our best advice would be to try using Segger J-Link. It comes with its own fully supported replacement for OpenOCD, which generally works better in many edge cases. VisualGDB supports both OpenOCD and J-Link software, so all the features you previously used will continue working the same way.
VisualGDB does not manage resetting/erasing directly. It simply launches the open-source OpenOCD tool that handles the low-level communication with the target.
You might be able to configure OpenOCD to change the reset behavior by editing the OpenOCD script files, however, this is something to do at your own risk and it may require extensive research into OpenOCD internals.
If you are looking for an easy out-of-the-box solution, please consider using Segger J-Link instead.
recently I have bougth a ESP32 devkit and a low budget FT4232H jtag adapter which I managed to setup in VSCode using the Espressif-idf plugin.
Basically it seems to work so far. I can build, flash and monitor the ESP32 from VSCode. Also also managed to setup the debug configuration, but I am still missing some features in while debugging.
I can step through the code, watch variables and see the call stack.
But I can't see periphals, registers or memory
I guess I have to set some more options in GDB, OpenOCd or even ESP32 config but I don't know which ones.
Any ideas were i have to dig?
You appear to be almost there.
I have a very similar interface with the memory loading afterwards but only after stepping into certain operations.
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-guides/jtag-debugging/debugging-examples.html
Following this document produced by espressif. Memory can be accessed and stepped into using the keyboard shortcut (x) when using openOCD.
Give that a try.
I'm working with an 8051 (Cypress FX2LP) that doesn't have jtag/bdm capability. Typically, developers on this project have been using ad-hoc serial printfs for debugging. I'm looking into options for serial debug monitors such as Keil's Mon51, Isd51 or IAR's generic ROM-monitor.
I'll need to modify/configure this debug monitor to write to code RAM (to set software breakpoints). I'd guess that most 8051 debug monitors offer the ability for such modifications in order to support Harvard architecture or bank switching.
Does anybody have recommendations for serial debuggers for 8051 or similar processors?
Have you had to modify it to write to Harvard code RAM or flash etc?
I used for years Keil uVision PK51 and the Cypress FX2 EZ-USB Development kit. This kit (EZ-USB_devtools_version_261700.zip) worked correctly with FX2 and FX2LP.
It includes a Windows driver that automatically downloads the monitor firmware on board and stay resident in 8051 memory. This monitor takes control of one of the 2 serial board and manage the communication with the debugging tool. You have to set the Keil environment debugger to use the "Keil Monitor-51 driver".
Once your fw is downloaded and running you can set breakpoints, display watch, etc...
The Cypress driver works correctly with Windows 2K/XP. I never tried it with Vista or later. Probably there is a newer version of the Cypress that is able to run on the latest Windows.
Good luck
I have been using Mon51 with the Cypress FX2 for going on 10 years with very good success. In addition we use the RTXtiny task switcher and code banking. I have found the monitor to be generally solid and with enough functionality for our needs.
The Mon-51 code comes as a library from Keil, so it is not available. A couple of years ago I was having trouble getting code banking to work with the monitor, and since I wasn't getting very good support from Keil, I started to disassemble the monitor to figure out what was going wrong. Before I got very far I solved my problem and I never finished the reverse engineering project.
Our hardware platform is "von-neumanized" so that code and xdata space overlap. This is necessary for the monitor to work correctly. We have modified the monitor initialization code so that it runs at 115200 baud from an external uart and that works well. In addition we had to build our own version of the monitor so that it was located at a different location in memory. Keil has actually made it pretty easy to configure things without having to dive into the actual monitor code.
I've to test some low level code on an ARM architecture. Typically experimentation is quite complicated on the real board, so I was thinking about QEMU.
What I'd like to get is some kind of debugging information like printfs or gdb. I know that this is simple with linux since it implements both the device driver for the QEMU Integrator and the gdb feature, but I'm not working with Linux. Also I suspect that extracting this kind of functionality from the Linux kernel source code would be complicated.
I'm searching from some simple operating system that already implements one of those features. Do you have some advice?
You don't need a target OS to debug code that's running inside QEMU -- QEMU already does that for you.
Specifically, QEMU supports remote debugging from GDB -- you can run QEMU with the appropriate command-line options and it will export an interface that a copy of GDB (running on the host machine) can connect to. At that point, you can debug the program in GDB pretty much just as if you were running it on the host machine.
http://wiki.osdev.org/GDB appears to have a bit more basic information; possibly not enough to completely get you started, but at least give you the basic idea and some terms to look for in the QEMU and GDB documentation. Skip over the bit about "Implementing GDB Stubs", which doesn't apply here since QEMU has one already, and start at the section on "Using Emulator Stubs". The short form is simply that you start QEMU with the -s option (export a GDB connection on localhost:1234) and the -S option (wait for a GDB "continue" command before starting execution), and then in GDB on your host you say target remote :1234 instead of run. Also, of course, you need to be using an ARM version of GDB rather than a native-x86 one.
(In addition, if you're willing to pay for a commercial solution, CodeSourcery's ARM toolchain has the IDE integration to set all of this up automatically, including support for "printf" to print into the debugger console. That works on a physical board, too, if you've got a hardware debugger. Usual disclaimer about me being a CodeSourcery employee applies -- but I do find it very easy to use.)
Update, 2012: CodeSourcery's toolchain is now called Mentor Graphics Sourcery CodeBench, but all the above still applies.
I realise that I am addressing your original problem here rather than your proposed solution (perhaps that's better?), but to use GDB (or Insight/GDB) directly on the target, use a low-cost JTAG tool and OpenOCD. An example of such a set-up and how to implement it can be found here.
If you have a larger budget, a more fully featured JTAG debugger may be useful, such as the Abatron BDI3000 with bdiGDB firmware which allows remote debugging and device programming over Ethernet with GDB and no special drivers or target debug agent.
Maybe a microkernel like OKL4 would suit your needs?