Video: Debug 101 with Atmel’s Paul Rako

In the first installment of this series, analog aficionado Paul Rako offers viewers an overview of Atmel debuggers such as the $49 AVR Dragon, JTAGICE3 and AVR ONE.

“For $49, you can get a debugger that’ll let you watch the chip execute, let you single-step through your program, let you see the effect of interrupts, and can really speed up how fast you’re bringing your program or your product, and the program in it, into market,” said Rako.

“Next up is [the $100] JTAGICE3. In addition to doing all the AVR chips and the AVR 32-bit chips, this product will also do the SAM D20 ARM Cortex M0+ chip. [There is also] the JTAGICE2. We used to sell this for $400. I’m kinda proud that we reduced the price by one fourth for the subsequent product.”

Meanwhile, Atmel’s AVR One! offers trace capability.

“With trace, you let your program execute. The trace just records. It’s like a log file and it tells you what’s going on. So, it’s $600. It’s hard to do trace real-time at the kind of speeds our microcontrollers (MCUs) run.”

As you can see in the video above, Paul also gets up close and personal with Atmel’s ARM-based SAM D20 Xplained Pro.

“What’s cool about the SAM D20, it’s an eval board with the chip, but it’s also got the debugger chip. You can come off of this board – when you get along with your design, you design your own PCB you can jump off of this board,” Rako explained.“And instead of debugging the SAM D20 that’s on this board, it’ll debug the SAM D20 that’s on your printed circuit board for your system.”

Last up is Atmel’s Cortex 4 Xplained.

“This isn’t an Xplained Pro- but because it’s the 4S, it just happens to have a debugger on it as well. You can use our STK600 and one of these debuggers to program and debug the things. You can use an Xplained Pro card,” Rako added. You can use some of the Xplained boards that have a debugger on them. It’s going to be so much faster than trying to write – printf – do a little flag, and write some thing off the serial port, to try to figure out where your program’s going, why it’s not doing what you expect.”

Xplained is the new Butterfly board

I was in a startup in 2001 when I first designed in Atmel products. One of the big enticements of Atmel was the really cheap demo board. Back then they called it a Butterfly board and it cost $49. Now we have things like our Xplained series evaluation kits. They are still low-cost, and they they can give you a big head-start in getting code written for your next project.

The Atmel starter guide gives some great advice on how to become instantly productive with AVR and ARM parts.

1. Download and install Studio 6
2. Check out some examples of similar things
3. Buy an in-circuit debugger– $49 Dragon, or $99 JTAG ICE, or the $599 AVR ONE!
4. Buy an eval kit, a starter kit,  a touch kit, a wireless kit, an evaluation kit, or a reference design.

This is the great thing about Atmel, for a really low cost you can have some hardware up and running. I plan on digging out my old Atmel projects and open-sourcing them for the community. Stay tuned to the Atmel Bits and Pieces.