ArduinoMania

If you are used to coding with almost any modern tool except the Arduino IDE, you are probably accustomed to having on-chip debugging. Sometimes having that visibility inside the code makes all the difference for squashing bugs. But for the Arduino, most of us resort to just printing print statements in our code to observe behavior. When the code works, we take the print statements out. [JoaoLopesF] wanted something better. So he created an Arduino library and a desktop application that lets you have a little better window into your program’s execution.

To be honest, it isn’t really a debugger in the way you normally think of it. But it does offer several nice features. The most rudimentary is to provide levels of messaging so you can filter out messages you don’t care about. This is sort of like a server’s log severity system. Some messages are warnings and some are informational, and some are verbose. You can select what messages to see.

In addition, the library timestamps the messages so you can tell how much time elapsed between messages and what function you were in during the message. It can also examine and set global variables that you preconfigure and set watches on variables. It is also possible to call functions from the serial monitor.

There’s a companion Java program (see video below) although you can use most of the features directly from the normal serial monitor, it just isn’t as pretty. The Java program can also read an Arduino program file and convert all the print calls in it to use the library, if you like.

As you might expect, this requires some cooperation from your program. You have to set up the library and the serial port. You also have to arrange for the main function to run frequently (for example, in the main loop). By default, the debugging is mostly suppressed (although you can change that). You have to issue a serial port command to turn on higher level logging and debug functions.

If you start with the examples that come with the library (use the simple one for an AVR-based Arduino and the advanced one for any others), you’ll see a few #defines you can use to control the library:

• DEBUG_DISABLED – Set to true and the library compiles out with no overhead
• DEBUG_DISABLE_DEBUGGER – Turn off everything but message logging
• DEBUG_INITIAL_LEVEL – Starting level of debug messages
• DEBUG_USE_FLASH_F – Store debug messages in flash memory

There’s really two versions of the code: one for 8-bit AVR processors and another for other Arduino types. We found problems building both of them. The files src/utility/Fields.cpp, src/utility/Vector.h, and
src/utility/Util.cpp refer to arduino.h. That works on computers that have case-insensitive file systems. In each case, for Linux, it needs to be Arduino.h. In addition, SerialDebug.cpp is lacking a stdarg.h include. We’ve reported both of these issues to the developer so they may be fixed by now.

You can explore the video and the documentation to see how it all works. Is it a full-blown debugger? No. You can’t stop execution (odd, because you certainly could technically), set breakpoints, or single step. But it still useful to have access to at least some of your program’s internal state.

Of course, Arduino has promised full debugging soon. We’ve even seen one Arduino debugging another via debugWIRE.