Embedded Rust Debugging

Description

Welcome everyone to this brief tutorial where you will be presented to a very useful tool: an embedded Rust debugger.

If you are a software engineer you know how useful a software debugger can be at times to debug your applications. If you are an EMBEDDED software engineer you know how useful a debugger can be not only to debug your software but also hardware since a debugger provides visibility of hardware configuration such as the microcontroller internal memory, peripherals and overall registers.

Typically most chip manufacturers have their own Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) which include their own integrated debugger. However, these IDEs only allow for embedded software to be developed in C and C++ programming languages. Rust is currently not supported.

Rust is a new system programming language which is becoming increasingly adopted in the development of embedded applications, but because it is not supported by the mainstream IDEs, most Rust development tools are open source... and this includes embedded debuggers!

At the moment, most Rust debugging options consist of command line based tools like OpenOCD and or GDB. OpenOcd and GDB are a fantastic tools which all embedded software engineer should at some point learn and be proficient with. However, as any tool, there are associated learning curves and the associated time necessary learning time... and, as we all know, time is not always available!

As such, I’d like to present you a fantastic project which is currently under development which makes the embedded Rust debugging experience similar to the one provided by most mainstream graphical interfaces tools one is used to when using most mainstream IDEs. This new embedded Rust debugger is called "Probe-rs debugger" and is meant to be used with Visual Studio Code editor. Probe-rs debugger fills a void in the embedded Rust development world and makes the embedded Rust debugging experience much faster, more pleasant and easier specially for beginners.

The objective of this brief course is to demonstrate how to setup and use the probe-rs debugger by providing practical examples using two platforms: a microchip and a stm32 CortexM4 based microcontrollers.

Starting from a clean state, we will install all the necessary tools and learn how to configure them.

By the end of this brief tutorial, you will be able to debug more than one application simultaneously.

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