This Is 100% How You Should Be Debugging | How to Use OpenOCD to Debug Embedded Software with GDB

Finding bugs in your embedded code is hard. Without print statements and minimal LED's to show signs of life, finding out why your embedded code is crashing is never easy. In this video, we use OpenOCD to debug our embedded code and watch the system as it runs. OpenOCD provides a seamless interface via Telnet and GDB to allow an embedded developer to watch their system as it runs.

🏫 COURSES 🏫

[edgeeffect]

When you talk about debuggers please don't forget The Black Magic probe.... so cheap, so easy, so cheap! I debug my Blue Pill with... well.... another Blue Pill!!!

[andybrown-maw]

Thanks so much, you would not believe how few, straight forward explanations of how to do this there are out there.

[Kid]

This is great, I’ve always wanted to get into embedded systems programming and it seems as your channel is where I’ll start 😁🙏🏽

[gideonzb]

I think I learned more in the last 7 and a half minute than I had expected. Wow! Well done!

[paulvohs]

I wasn't aware you could toggle the display format while inside gdb... I normally just run with --tui when I start.
Will have to give that a go next time!

[eyalgerber]

Really informative video. Thanks a lot. For me personally you hit the nail on the head with this video. It was exactly what I was looking for.

[chrisidema]

Thank you so much! It's really hard to find working up-to-date examples like this. So many old examples don't work anymore. I was able to get SWO working. And I also got debugging of the nRF using the st-link working.

[magnoelmagnifico]

Wow, this is really cool! I didn't know gdb could do that

[burningglory]

Almost every embedded system I have worked with, one of the engineers has dedicated a UART for a serial debugging console.

[benarcher]

Perfect! I've done something similar with two rpi picos. Now I know also what openOCD actually does! Thanks.

[SomeTechGuy]

FYI, in Fedora, the st-link package is stlink, not st-link.

Also, there is no gdb-multiarch on Fedora. Use regular gdb but set arch once you start it.

Great video.

[jorgelinares]

Thank you so much, it is really hard to find simple, relevant information regarding debugging on embedded

[conorstewart]

Not to be that guy but is there a GUI for it? I’ve used the STM32CubeIDE and it has a debug mode that has all the functionality of this and probably more, like having a live view of global variables as the program runs and being able to see the disassembly, and it seems it would be easier just to scroll through your code whilst it running and just click to create a breakpoint wherever you want it, the interface in the IDE seems a lot easier to use with more functionality than this, so is there a non STM GUI version of this for other chips?

[jakehallam]

Jesus Christ, I've wasted a week being stuck with debugging because I forgot to add the "target extended-remote" step to my damn notes! Thanks for the video though, the instructions hold up for other boards too.

[Ma_X]

Oscilloscope helps with debugging very much. Sometimes I can make all the job using only one or two pins to out either logical states through them or use them as a clock/data pair to see bytes on the oscilloscope directly.

[minirop]

that's why I love my little Arduino Zero, since it has an EDBG included. (I also have a jlink for my other boards)

[TheStuartstardust]

I think it might be easier to just code correct the first time 😁🤓😂 ..just kidding, really nice, did not know this could be done command line like this! Good content! 💪👌👍🤓

[ikefir]

Hello, LLL, may i humbly request a dive into GD32VF103 MCU. It's a 32-bit RISC-V chip. It is rather basic at the moment, but something tells me that as time goes on this architecture will become more and more mainstream. And a lot of folks would like to watch series on RISC-V assembly as well as corresponding GCC stack. Cheers.

[diegopinilla]

great video! never debugged a microcontroller, but it doesn't seems too difficult.

[jbvalle]

Thank you sooo much for this tutorial!