In recent years, Raspberry Pi has successively launched the miniature control board Raspberry Pi Pico, and the self-developed control chip RP2040. Some players combined the two and got a debug tool to eliminate programming errors. Inspired by this, Raspberry Pi officially made a hardware debugger, the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe, which sells for only $12.
The Raspberry Pi official said in a blog post that many programmers like programming, but debugging is annoying, which requires a debugger. However, there are still many difficulties due to different functions, programming languages, and environments. Fortunately, modern Arm-based controllers, including Raspberry Pi’s own RP2040, have built-in Arm’s CoreSight architecture, providing Access Port (AP) on the chip for establishing breakpoints, viewing processor registers, and accessing memory.
Fortunately, modern Arm-based controllers, including Raspberry Pi’s own RP2040, have built-in Arm’s CoreSight architecture, providing Access Port (AP) on the chip for establishing breakpoints, viewing processor registers, and accessing memory. On the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe, there is a 3-pin Serial Wire Debug (SWD) interface, which is used to connect to the DP port of the access chip, and the other end is connected to PC or Mac through a USB interface so that developers can debug the chip on the host side.
In addition to being used for debugging,
Raspberry Pi Debug Probe can also be used as a USB serial port adapter to establish communication between the computer and the microcontroller through the UART interface, and do debugging and diagnosis on the latter. This usage will be liked by many players who like to fiddle with the development board. Compared with some dedicated USB serial port adapters, the price of Raspberry Pi is also cheaper.
In addition to the main body, this small tool worth tens of dollars also comes with a matching connecting line and a small case. You can use it after assembling it yourself. If you want to make your own line, you can refer to their
interface documentation. Interested developers can go to the
official website to have a look.
