Debugging Tools

R Pankau

Hi I am a process control guy, PLCs and Digital Control Systems mostly DeltaV...· anyway I really enjoy having an on-line mode from which to debug applications.· Maybe I'm lazy,· My micro experience has been with PIC micros and I'm growing tired of the debug cycle and am considering moving to the SX or Propeller if the propeller can do some of these fancy on-line debugging tricks.· I have implemented serial debugging schemes in the past but in a small application with no USART it is a hassle.· So I guess the question is, What is the on-line debugging envirnment like in the Propelller world?· or SX for that matter although this is the propeller forum.··

thanks.·

Mike Green

The Propeller is a sophisticated, high performance processor. Unless your application would use all of the COGs, you can run a VGA text display with 2 cogs and not a huge memory cost in buffers. A TV (video) display has less room on it, but can use only one COG and less memory for a screen buffer. Once one of these displays is initialized, your application doesn't have to know anything about it. Similarly, you can set up a PS/2 keyboard driver in a COG that runs independently of your program once initialized. Communication with the keyboard and display is through a common memory buffer. If you're developing in assembly language, the assembly routines can directly write to the screen buffer or read from the keyboard buffer. There's not a developed debugger yet, but, with the ability to do autonomous I/O, it's pretty easy to do debugging.

In my case, I'm debugging both SPIN code and assembly I/O drivers. I've embedded a simple command interpreter into my program and can do memory and external EEPROM dumps, change EEPROM locations, and do some more complex stuff as well. When I need to trace a routine, I simply embed display write statements in any format that helps (hex, binary, decimal, text). Since the display routines do windowing, I can set up a separate window on part of the screen and switch to that for the debug statements.

With the assembly routines, I can embed calls to routines that write to the screen buffer at specific locations editing to hex, binary, or decimal as well with text if I want.

R Pankau

Well that does help clarify things. I may take the plunge into propeller applications.


thanks.