Category: Software tools

Some useful software tools

Debugging 2.0

September 14, 2023 / nebel / 0 Comments

The featured image of this blog post is based on vector graphics by captainvector at 123RF.

What keeps people from using a debugger? Well, it is mostly that one has initial costs in terms of setting up the debugging environment and of learning how to use the debugging tool. Hopefully, the next iteration of my hardware debugging tool dw-link, which is able to debug classic ATtinys and ATmegaX8s, will somewhat ease that burden, in particular, because you can buy the accompanying hardware now at Tindie.

Debugging(4): Stub it out!

July 22, 2021 / nebel / 0 Comments

The featured image is by Hebi B. on Pixabay

How can you use a stub in order to squash your software bugs? This blog post shows how to arrive in 7 easy steps at a working debugging solution using a gdb-stub for some 8-bit AVR MCUs. The only additional hardware you need is an ISP programmer in order to burn a new bootloader (well, if you are satisfied with a very slow-running program, you do not even need this).

Burnt Fuses and Bricked MCUs

July 21, 2021 / nebel / 0 Comments

Featured image: Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay

One of the most confusing things, in particular for newcomers, are the AVR fuses. Worse, by setting the wrong fuse bits, you can “brick” your MCU, i.e., a normal ISP-programmer cannot talk to the MCU anymore. In this blog post, we will present tools that help you to set the fuse bits right. And if push comes to shove, that is the wrong fuses have been burnt, I tell you how to recover …

I’m Sorry, Dave, I Can’t do That

July 13, 2021 / nebel / 0 Comments

The featured image of this blog post has been created by Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, Link

Gdb, the GNU debugger, is probably the most used open source debugger for embedded systems. The AVR version of GDB on the Mac is unfortunately not very cooperative. If you try to read an elf file, you get the following funny message (reminding us of HAL9000):

I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that. Symbol format `elf32-avr’ unknown.

But with the right homebrew formula, one can teach GDB some new tricks …

EDIT: The problem has been solved by the homebrew maintainers.