Collaborate Disseminate
When a processor has a fault it can leave what looks to be precious little in the way of cause and effect. Debug-by-print-statement works surprisingly well in simple cases, but where in a desktop environment you would drop into a debugger to solve trickier problems this can be an onerous …read more
Continue reading Debug Superpowers Bring An STM32 Back From The Dead
C-programmers who don’t have a mental model of what’s going on underneath their thin veneer of abstraction above assembly code are destined for trouble. In order to provide a convenient way to understand what C-code gets compiled to and how it runs on the machine, [Alex Beharrell] has created penguinTrace, …read more
Continue reading Examine Source Code to Assembly Mapping with penguinTrace
We’ve all been there. When debugging a microcontroller project, we just want to put in a print statement to figure out what’s going on with the microcontroller in real time. However, advanced embedded programmers know that printf statements are verboten: they’re just too SLOW. While not fixing this plight entirely, [Atakan Sarioglu] has come up with a clever way to create readable debug messages with minimal runtime overhead.
[Atakan Sarioglu]’s innovation, called BigBug (Github), is a dynamically-generated codebook. The codebook translates abbreviated messages sent over serial (UART here) to longer-form human-readable messages. To generate the codebook, BigBug automatically parses your …read more
Continue reading “DB” = Abbreviated Microcontroller Debugging
When Daniel
Bohannon released his excellent DOSfuscation
paper, I was fascinated to see how tricks I used as a systems engineer
could help attackers evade detection. I didn’t have much to contribute
to this conversation until I had to ana… Continue reading Cmd and Conquer: De-DOSfuscation with flare-qdb
Debuggers come in all shapes and sizes, offering a variety of options to track down your software problems and inspecting internal states at any given time. Yet some developers have a hard time breaking the habit of simply adding print statements into their code instead, performing manual work their tools could do for them. We say, to each their own — the best tools won’t be of much help if they are out of your comfort zone or work against your natural flow. Sometimes, a retrospective analysis using your custom-tailored debug output is just what you need to tackle an …read more
Continue reading Stepping up your Python Printf Debugging Game
As every Hackaday reader knows, and tells us at every opportunity in the comments, adding an Arduino to your project instantly makes it twice as cool. But what if, in the course of adding an Arduino to your project, you run into a problem and need to debug the code? What if you could use a second Arduino to debug the first? That would bring your project up to two Arduinos, instantly making it four times as awesome as before you started! Who could say no to such exponential gains?
Not [Wayne Holder], that’s for sure. He writes in to …read more
Synaptics said reports that hundreds of HP laptops contained a secret keylogger that traced back to debugger software made by the company are inaccurate. Continue reading Synaptics Says Claims of a Keylogger in HP Laptops are False
If you’ve done 3D printing, you’ve probably at least heard of Tinkercad. This popular CAD package runs in your browser and was rescued from oblivion by Autodesk a few years ago. [Chuck] recently did a video about a new Tinkercad feature: building and simulating virtual Arduino circuits. You can watch it below.
There are a variety of components you can add to your design. You’ll find an integrated code editor and a debugger. You can even get to the serial monitor, all in your browser with no actual Arduino hardware. You can also build simple circuits that don’t use an …read more
One of the best feature of the ESP8266 is it’s ability to self-host a web server, allowing for fairly complicated user interactions. The dEEbugger by [S-March] is a nifty little ESP8266 based device with a plethora of features in a small package.
The USB-powered device has a web user interface that enables it to be used as a low bandwidth oscilloscope, I2C terminal, or UART terminal. As an scope, you may connect to it via your tablet and then use it as a remote voltage monitor. There is a peak detection feature which is a nice touch and gives the …read more
The Teensy is a powerful ARM-based development board with loads of features that can do fun stuff with USB as well. Like many dev boards, it uses a less powerful processor as an interface. Teensy designer [Paul Stoffregen] added a debug header to allow direct SWD JTAG access to the main chip, but the interface microcontroller has to be silenced for that to work, and the code to do so is still in progress.
Impatient, [Erich Styger] documents the changes he made to add support for the J-Link SWD protocol by removing the offending NXP Kinetis KL02Z that serves as …read more
