In Circuit Debugger?

Trampas · Guest

OK, I have one of Microchip's ICD2 devices. I have never been able to use the device as a debugger. Most of the time when I try it will crash MPLAB. When it does not crash I set a breakpoint and hit run. It appears to run forever and never get to the breakpoint.

So since Microchip's tech support is dumb as I am, and have not been able to figure out why saying "it should work" does not fix the problem. I was wondering if their is a better way to debug PIC processors?

I think it may be that I expect to have more than one page of code and get it to run on the PIC processors which I gather they were never designed for such use.

Trampas

drolleman · Guest

You may have the default windows usb drivers loaded. I use the icd 2 every day. And it works fine, but it has problems if you use a proto board because the capacitance of the board may cause the signals to become slewd. i also use icd-s for programming and it also is even less dependible. I build the actuall board and have had no problems since. it would be nice if the could slow down the data rate (optional)so the don't become a problem.

valemike · Guest

On my laptop, i have MPLAB ICD 6.4. It is guaranteed to crash sooner or later when I use the ICD-2 to debug my board. I now use 6.5 (there is a also a 6.6 out there I think.) With 6.5, it barely crashes.

Another way to debug is to use Hyperterminal doing printf(). I use this to see if my floating point calculations are correct, since the MPLAB IDE cannot handle CCS's floating point stuff.

Guest · Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2004 9:12 am

Yeap I use hyperterminal and printf's alot for debugging. The problem is that I am not above stupid errors like if (i=0) { } or putting a less than instead of a greater than, etc. These problems take awhile to find using printf routines, while just stepping through the code once will usually find them right away.

I have MPLAB 6.6 currently installed, and was trying to get the ICD to work with the dsPIC processor and Microchip's development board. I was able to get the ICD working with pure assembly code. However when I do C code, I have found that something is hosed and the ICD gets stuck in a loop. Then when I halt the processor through the ICD, it will not show me where in the code I am, thus I have no way of knowing what is going on. Of course the code will run fine with out the ICD, or at least to my printf where I set the break point.

Trampas