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

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

Qbit — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:41:20 GMT

his is a fantastic and very real problem to solve. Anyone who has spent hours staring at the CFSR and HFSR bits trying to figure out if an imprecise bus fault was caused by a wild pointer or a clock issue knows exactly how intimidating this is for beginners and frustrating for pros.

As for validation: yes, the pain point is real. While intermediate/senior devs might eventually get used to manually decoding register dumps or running custom GDB scripts, a dedicated, human-readable report would save a massive amount of time—especially when dealing with junior team members.

For the format, I think a cross-platform CLI tools that can output JSON/Markdown would be the most versatile starting point. That way, it can easily be hooked into VS Code tasks or automated CI/CD build/test pipelines later on. Looking forward to seeing how this develops!

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

shabaz — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:46:41 GMT

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.

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

vmate — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:45:05 GMT

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.