MSP430 Debugging with open source tools

I recently switched to using open source tools to work on the msp430 micro controller architecture.  The previous post included a few pictures of the in-circuit programming / debugging adapter I constructed.  In this post I will talk a little bit about using Data Display Debugger on Linux to debug micro controller code.  The screen shot below is an active debug session using the data display debugger.

Data Display Debugger debugging firmware code.

If you aren't quite familiar with the tool set, please investigate the following links.

• msp430-gcc
• mspdebug
• ddd

 During the normal process of working with this micro controller one will use their favorite editor and either the msp430-gcc distribution tools directly or through a makefile to build the elf binary which is loaded to the micro controller.
A typical session looks as such:

mspdebug session connected to fet debugger

In order to debug using the msp430-gdb debugger from the command line, you need to start the gdb client within the mspdebug application.  The below screen shot shows this.

mspdebug hosting gdb client

Once the gdb client has been started, we can connect with the msp430-gdb debugger instance by using msp430-gdb binary-name.elf, as you see in the screen shot my application is Potentiometer.elf.  After the gdb console session starts up, you must type into the command session target remote localhost:2000 as that is the port that mspdebug's gdb client is running on . A console based session is shown below.

msp430-gdb being used in console mode

This is usable and quite fast, however it isn't very intuitive.  Many developers would prefer to use a GUI debugger interface.  The way to do that with these tools is to start the data display debugger from the command line in the following manner: ddd --debugger msp430-gdb binary-name.elf.

Aside from these steps, there is a way to just start the gdb client from the command line in one command as well: mspdebug rf2500 gdb 2000 .

Hopefully, this helps to make working with the debugger for msp430 micro controllers a little easier.

I started working with micro-controllers recently and needed an easy way to debug code in-circuit.

So I built an in-circuit adapter that allows me to use the Launch Pad's MSP430 fet Debugger while the micro-controller is setup in a breadboard.

Getting back into Linux

Screen shot of my current Linux desktop ( SL6.3 ).

Up late, isn't it Great!! /sigh

A picture is really worth a thousand words..... Up late still configuring virtual machines for development.

Bochs Configuration for internal gui debugger...

This seems to be the best debugging configuration for Bochs-2.4.6 and using the Gui Debugger

configure
--enable-smp
--enable-all-optimizations
--enable-x86_64
--enable-pci
--enable-vmx
--enable-debugger
--enable-disasm
--enable-debugger-gui
--enable-logging
--enable-vbe
--enable-fpu
--enable-3dnow
--enable-cdrom
--enable-x86-debugger
--enable-iodebug
--with-x
--with-x11
--with-term

Time and No Time...

I have been pretty slammed the last few weeks, I haven't had time for much of anything at all.  That being said, I am exploring Qt Creator IDE that was talked up in the C++ Pro group on LinkedIn.  It seems to be exactly what they said it was, awesome.  I haven't had any chance to sit down and work on Placement Alloc/Malloc/New system yet.  But it will eventually get implemented.  Here is the mandatory screenshot of Qt Creator with my OS project loaded...

Working IRQs and System Timer

The system timer spitting out tick counts while a for loop spits out an index. This is pretty good step as now I have ISRs and IRQs as well as a system timer.