In all the time I’ve been developing Floppy Emu, can you believe I’ve never had a debugger? I use the Atmel AVRISP mkII to program the Emu’s ATMEGA1284 microcontroller, but the mkII only supports programming and not debugging. I don’t have a serial port or other logging mechanism either, so when I encounter mystery problems, I need to debuga them by displaying one-time error codes or blinking an LED. Not very convenient.
Last week I finally purchased a proper debugger – the Atmel-ICE. It supports both JTAG and debugWIRE debugging, which are the two interfaces used in the ATMEGA family of microcontrollers. The Atmel-ICE also supports Atmel’s SAM family of 32-bit ARM microcontrollers, which will be handy if/when I start working with those.
With excitement, I connected the Atmel-ICE to Floppy Emu’s 6-pin ISP port. I was able to communicate with the ATMEGA1284 chip, view its fuses, and reprogram it. Visions of breakpoints and memory dumps danced in my head – this was going to be awesome. Then I started a debug session, only to encounter this error:
Use Start Without Debugging to avoid this message.
Wha-wha-what? Does not support debugging??
I searched in vain for a debugWIRE option, but the only interface choices displayed by the software were ISP and JTAG. After a frantic documentation search I discovered the sad truth. I’d thought the ATMEGA1284 had both debugWIRE and JTAG debugging interfaces, but the presence of JTAG actually means the chip doesn’t support debugWIRE. Even though the necessary debugWIRE pins are right there, and debugWIRE is mentioned in the chip’s datasheet, and there’s a debugWIRE enable fuse on the chip. Ugh.
I confirmed that a test project configured for the ATMEGA328P causes the debugWIRE option to appear in the Atmel Studio software. But Floppy Emu doesn’t have a ATMEGA328P. As soon as I change the project’s device type to ATMEGA1284, the debugWIRE option disappears.
Unfortunately I can’t use the JTAG interface, because I didn’t plan for it, and there’s no JTAG connector on the Floppy Emu board. I can’t do micro-soldering surgery to create a JTAG port either, because the ATMEGA1284 JTAG pins are connected to the board’s Xilinx CPLD chip, to support runtime reprogramming of the CPLD.
I’ll continue debugging with a blinking LED. Debuggers are for wimps. 