Re: Debugging: Am I a dreamer. . . ?

Tomás Ó hÉilidhe <toe@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I've been programming in C for the best part of a decade now but it's
only within the last year that I've really started doing embedded
systems programming.

When I did C programming for a personal computer, I commonly debugged
my code simply by putting in printf statements around the place to
check variable values, and also by using the instrument that lets you
check the values of variables at runtime when you're stepping through
the code.


If you really programming in C for years, you know that using printf
or debugger to remove bugs, only gives the design more bugs. Embedded
solutions stay away bugs by careful design (in both IC/HW/BSP/SW).

Anyway, when I was doing my embedded systems project this year for
college, I was kind of in the dark when my board's program started to
malfunction. If I'd been using a PC, I would have used the debugger to
single-step through code to check variables' values. What I eventually
did was take the offending code and move it across to a PC, and then I
used the PC to debug it.

Anyway, here's the dream I had in my head, which may or may not be a
pipe dream:
You know the PIC16F684 chip that costs less than a dollar, well
what if they brought out the debug version of it (that costs maybe 20
dollars). The debug version would fit perfectly into the normal chip
slot, except that it would have some sort of socket on the top of it
for hooking it to a PC for doing stuff like printf's, and also maybe
for running a full debugger that will let you check variables' values?
That means the debugger version has a FSM running to implement a SW
debugger! A 20b dollars's NRE cost may give you the solution.
You need a SW stub, or an ICE stub.
.

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