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  • Author Author: Former Member
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The First Practical Arduino Debugger

Former Member

This tutorial shows how to get started with the Arduino debug tools from Visual Micro.

 

 

The debug tool is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio Professional and Atmel Studio development systems which also provide 100% compatible Arduino programming, compile and upload.

 

Programming with a debugger has long been considered an important tool for every software developer. Arduino does not normally provide debug facilities, so this tool is, in some ways, breaking new ground.

 

In this video we demonstrate how to add breakpoints that allow us to inspect expressions while an Arduino is running.

 

This video tutorial also demonstrates how to add conditions to breakpoints. Conditions are very useful when looking for exceptions to the "norm".

 

The tutorial also shows how to switch between normal Arduino compilation and debug compilation, how to compile and how to upload to any Arduino board.

 

The Arduino plugin for Visual Studio is free, the debug tool, which is in final beta, will be an optional low cost upgrade but is currently available for free to anyone who wants to try it. We expect this offer to end in December 2012. To obtain a free copy of the debug tool simply join the Visual Micro Forum and request to join the debug beta team. We currently have about 100 beta testers of various experience levels, the more the better!

 

The debug tools work with usb/serial which includes xbee.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    And why revive a 4yo thread anyway?

  • in reply to teprojects1

    Junaid,

    how does that link relate to the rest of the article?

  • in reply to Former Member

    Bill

    You may wish to keep an eye on 12blocks.

    Hanno is busy finishing his testing of the Arduino implementation, which has some excellent features.

    As well as real-time debugging and monitoring of the variables, it allows them to be changed in real-time.

    No change in bootloader is required, and it also allows multi-thread processing ie running several sketches at the same time on the hardware.

     

    All this and multi-platform support and drag and drop programming, as well as code ...its very clever.

     

    Mark

  • Hello billabott, the debug tool was announced in may of this year on arduino.cc forum and opened for beta testers a short time after that. There wasn't a huge public announcement because we could not have responded quickly to more than a few beta testers at all once. Since may the beta team has grown to about 100 people, the product has matured and is being used by a wide range of users from novice to expert. we have had great feedback which always makes things worthwhile. The open source visualizations were included in August and we are now at a stable point where the debug tool is ready for the wider audience.

     

    The debug tool relies heavily on the free Arduino plugin for Visual Studio. The plugin was released in a crude form in 2009/2010, re-vamped in 2011 to provide all of the features of the Arduino such as others cores, burning bootloaders, using programmers and of course the usual compile, serial upload etc. The plugin is a complete Arduino solution and the plan shortly is to provide a platform builder allowing us (or users) to register new non-arduino platforms such as TI, ChipKit, Maple, Due etc.

     

    As concerns the YouTube video it plays okay for me and maybe will for you if you try again. At 25 minutes length I think it is too long and slow for experienced users so I was wondering if the problem you encountered was that you fell asleep? image image

    Only joking, we will make a series of shorter tutorials over the coming weeks.

     

    ps: To make one thing clear. You are right that we do not need an expensive hardware programmer to debug Arduino but the debug tool will probably cost 30-40 dollars. The tool works at a higher level than a hardware programmer. For many, this is a benefit because it is easier to use and to diagnose problems, but for experts or certain applications it might not be what is required. It is encouraging that we have some "experts" on the beta test team, their feedback so far is that they don't bother with hardware debuggers anymore.