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  • Author Author: Moussa1492
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Validating an idea: a tool to explain STM32/Cortex-M HardFaults more clearly

Moussa1492

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a small tool idea around STM32 / Cortex-M debugging, and I’d like honest feedback before building too much.

The problem I’m trying to validate is this:

When a Cortex-M firmware crashes into HardFault_Handler, many students, junior developers, and even intermediate embedded developers struggle to understand what actually happened. The data is usually there — CFSR, HFSR, BFAR, MMFAR, stacked PC, LR/EXC_RETURN, stack frame, GDB logs — but interpreting it correctly is not always obvious.

The idea is not to build another IDE or replace STM32CubeIDE, VS Code, Ozone, or GDB.

The first version would be an offline analyzer:

  • input: .elf file, GDB log, register dump, stack dump

  • output: a clear report explaining the probable fault cause, source line if available, decoded fault registers, and suggested next checks

Example use case:

  • firmware crashes into HardFault

  • developer copies the relevant GDB/register dump

  • tool generates a readable diagnostic report

I’m especially interested in whether this would be useful for:

  • STM32 learners

  • embedded training centers

  • university labs

  • junior firmware developers

  • small teams without a Cortex-M debug expert

A few questions:

  1. When you hit a HardFault on STM32/Cortex-M, how do you debug it today?

  2. Do tools like Ozone, CubeIDE, Cortex-Debug, or your own scripts already solve this well enough?

  3. Would a readable diagnostic report save time, or is this not a real pain point?

  4. Would this be more useful as:

    • a CLI tool,

    • a VS Code extension,

    • a training/teaching tool,

    • or just documentation/tutorials?

  5. For educators: would structured HardFault/BusFault exercises be useful in embedded courses?

I’m not trying to sell anything at this stage. I’m trying to understand whether the problem is real enough before investing more development time.

Brutally honest feedback is welcome.

  • Is this a uni project? I thought you were developing an IDE, but now you explicitly state this is not an IDE related project.

    I can't see much value to this new idea either. Regarding:

    developer copies the relevant GDB/register dump

    In reality, apart from the simplest scenarios, this alone can be very insufficient, so any tool that only relies on that will be suboptimal. I'm not saying the tool might provide no benefit, I'm suggesting it might provide little additional benefit, and wouldn't reduce the workload much, nor reduce the learning curve much:

    In a work environment it's probably more worthwhile the user being familiar with how to drive GDB themselves, and in an education/learning environment students are often taught principles of typical microcontroller instruction sets at least to a high level  so I can't see where your tool fits in.

    Also. I'm curious, what benefit can the tool have, over (say) pasting in the detail into any LLM such as ChatGPT and also providing a load of context (e.g. "this crash happens when the temperature rises").

    Crashes should be so infrequent that almost every debugging session is fairly unique; for instance, sometimes the user may need to add more code to get more usable debug when the system crashes.

  • I think it should definitely be a VSCode extension. Getting people to use another tool, that doesn't integrate well with their workflows, is unfamiliar, etc, is a big hassle. With a VSCode extension, you'd have a bunch of existing tooling to build upon, simple to install, integrates well, no need to install a separate program.

    I don't have any Cortex-M debugging experience at all, so if an extension existed that could just magically tell me what went wrong, give me a call stack, jump to the specific lines in source files, maybe even give some plain English description for common issues, that would be a really cool and useful tool.