The featured image of this blog post has been generated by Stable Diffusion.
What happens if you take a dozen clocks and throw them into the flow of time?
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Something you have not known before
ATmega328P: Fake or Real?
The featured image of this blog post is by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay.
Recently, I bought some ATmega328P-PU (DIP packages) chips in China and was concerned that they might be counterfeit, given that three years ago some ATmega328P clones, which did not support nano-power, had been found on Pro Mini boards. The first check looked as if they were fake chips, but apparently, they are the real thing. but they seem to work fine.
The Return of the Y2K Bug
The featured image of this blog post is based on a picture by JL G on Pixabay
If you are old enough, you probably remember the Y2k bug. Now, mankind should have learned from it, right? Wrong!
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Parasitic Power Supply
The featured image of this post is by Emphyrio on Pixabay
In parasitic power supply mode, a device sucks its juice from a data line instead of from the power rail. This can be intended or unintended. In the latter case, all sorts of funny things can happen.
Continue readingMake it Fail
(David J. Agans)
The quote is from Dave’s book Debugging: the 9 indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive software and hardware problems, which I recommend to everybody who has to debug a technical artifact.
Fixing Problems … Using Super-Global Variables
Another xkcd comic that hits the spot. Except, with my new hardware debugger, this is the past 😎. Recently, I debugged one of my electronic geocaching gadgets and was positively surprised how easy it was to figure out ones own mistakes and to come up with the right fix.
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That’s One Small Step for a Man, One Giant Leap for a Debugger: On Single-Stepping and Interrupts
The featured image of this post is by WikiImages on Pixabay
You want to make a single step in your program, but the debugger takes you to some unknown area of the program. This was, in fact, my first experience when I tried out Microchip’s MPLAB X IDE debugger on the innocent blinking sketch. Is this a bug or a feature?
Continue readingThere has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers
… but the periods might have become shorter with the right tools
Surprise, Surprise!
The featured image of this post is by Albert Guillaume – Gils Blas, 24 décembre 1895, Public Domain, Link
When you develop a tool for a protocol that is undocumented, it is not surprising that you will encounter situations you will not have be anticipated. And this was exactly what I experienced developing the hardware debugger dw-link, which connects debugWIRE MCUs to the GDB debugger. Although a substantial part of the debugWIRE protocol has been reverse engineered, I encountered still plenty of surprising situations: Split personality MCUs, stuck-at-one bits in program counters, secret I/O addresses, half-legal opcodes, and more.
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Debugging a Debugger With Itself
The featured image of this post is is a comic from xkcd.com.
The above xkcd comic, which is titled Debugger, alludes to the concern that when you try to apply a particular method to itself, you might not get what you asked for. Turing’s Halting problem is a very famous example of this, i.e., you cannot algorithmically decide whether an algorithm terminates on an input. So, does that issue apply to debuggers as well? In particular, I asked myself whether it makes sense to debug the hardware debugger I am developing with itself.
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