Author Topic: Thought for a debugging interface "uProbe"  (Read 5585 times)

Offline mhoneywill

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Thought for a debugging interface "uProbe"
« on: June 19, 2012, 04:02:36 PM »
Just a thought about a feature to add to utasker, a debug probe that worked in a similar way to the following products

Freemaster http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=FREEMASTER
uC/Probe http://micrium.com/page/products/tools/probe

This could connect to the target using any of the following interfaces

serial Uart
UDP
SPI or I2c using an FTDI cable (http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Cables/USBMPSSE.htm)
Comms channel over JTAG (This might be more difficult as it would require hooking into the compiler IDE)

This debug link could be the default way that debug information is reported from uTasker.

I have used a similar UDP only solution for the Rabbit processors, see this link for more details and source http://shdesigns.org/rabbit/udpdebug.shtml maybe the same UDP protocol could be used.

Offline hervé

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Re: Thought for a debugging interface "uProbe"
« Reply #1 on: July 05, 2012, 08:58:11 AM »
Hi,

I use similar debug tool, then through UDP packets I can check or change every data zone that the µP can access. I can also call function while the program is running, it is very useful for debbuging : in my case as the board controls fast movement and therefore I cant use breakpoint.
I use the µC/Probe like command to read/write byte,word, or long data at specific address.
I had to have a map file of the variables addresses except for some specific data for which I use a table to reference them : I will fetch the address of this table so I can have access to all variables that are referenced without having to know their absolute address.
For others I use the .Map file generated by the compiler.

On the PC I have a small application that can scan a list of variable in a cyclic manner.
On do this manually.

The code on the target is small and quite generic...