RE: The First Practical Arduino Debugger

teprojects1 — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 15:40:04 GMT

[deleted]

RE: The First Practical Arduino Debugger

Former Member — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 16:41:10 GMT

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? [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-e1bbad83-2c01-4016-ba34-8f31a883f71b/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16] [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-e1bbad83-2c01-4016-ba34-8f31a883f71b/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

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.

RE: The First Practical Arduino Debugger

billabott — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 04:50:00 GMT

This is the first I have heard of being able to debug the Arduino (ATMega328) without using the ISP port with an expensive tool. How long has this capability of Visual Studio Pro been known of within Arduino circles?

Only was able to watch a little more than 1/2 of the video before "it had a problem."