Raspberry Pi Foundation launches $12 USB Debug Probe • The Register

The Raspberry Pi Basis has a brand new gadget: an inexpensive, simple USB probe for debugging bare-metal code on a Pi Pico… nevertheless it ought to work with a number of different units too.

The Debug Probe is a tool to assist debug bare-metal software program on the Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is the Basis’s $4 single-board computer for microcontroller type roles. In embedded computer systems like this, there’s typically no show output, and in typical use, no working system – each of which make it tough to observe what it is doing, or extra to the purpose, work out why it isn’t doing it.

A standard method to peer into the reminiscence of an embedded Arm gadget and work out what it is doing is Arm’s SWD interface, or Single Wire Debug – broadly, Arm’s three-wire model of the normal four- or five-wire JTAG interface.

Nonetheless, to make use of these SWD alerts, you want a tool to learn and translate them into one thing one other laptop can learn and interpret, utilizing software program such because the FOSS OpenOCD or pyOCD. (On this context, OCD stands for On-Chip Debugger.) This gadget is known as a debug probe.

Conveniently, a Raspberry Pi’s GPIO interface can discuss SWD over a number of of its pins [PDF]. This implies you need to use one Pi to debug one other Pi. That even contains the Pi Pico utilizing some particular firmware known as Picoprobe. That is somewhat cheaper than a devoted {hardware} debug probe. The snag is that you will nonetheless have to wire up some circuits, as this blogpost describes.

Even when it is versatile – as an illustration, you can too use SWD to upload software program right into a Pi Pico from one other Pi – it isn’t that simple, and if you wish to use a much bigger, sooner laptop, comparable to a PC or Mac, you then have to interface your Pi-based probe to that.

Which is the promoting level of the brand new Pi Debug Probe. You plug one finish into your Pi Pico, and the opposite finish right into a free USB port, and also you’re able to go. It is a very low-end providing, nevertheless it ought to do the job – and it is $12. For comparability, an expert device comparable to a Segger J-Link is available in at between $500 to $1000, and even an open-source {hardware} gadget comparable to an ORBtrace Mini – as an illustration from this store – is round ten instances the worth.

Higher nonetheless, the Pi Debug Probe ought to be capable to discuss to any embedded gadget with an Arm Cortex M collection and an SWD interface, comparable to the Arm-powered Arduino Due, or the 32-bit variants of the Teensy improvement boards. These are standard for duties like equipping classic keyboards with a USB interface. ®