11:16 am February 22, 2023 By Julian Horsey

The engineers and designers at Raspberry Pi have this week launched a new piece of hardware in the form of the plug and play Raspberry Pi Debug Probe which is now available to purchase priced at just $12. Inspiration for the latest addition to the range of Raspberry Pi hardware was from people using a Raspberry Pi Pico to debug programs running on another.

The complete debug hardware solution for Arm based microcontrollers is powered by the companies RP2040 and provides a USB to Serial Wire Debug (SWD) bridge, a generic USB serial adapter and cables to connect to a host computer to debug. Eben Upton has taken to the official Raspberry Pi news site to reveal more about the launch of the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe and explain a little more about its design.

“If you’re anything like me, you enjoy writing computer programs, but hate tracking down the resulting bugs. But bug hunting is a necessary evil, and if you want to hunt bugs, sooner or later you’re going to need a debugger. While most debuggers offer a common set of basic capabilities (single stepping, breakpoints, inspection of variables and memory), these capabilities are provided in different ways depending on your choice of language and operating environment.”

Specifications include a form factor of just 22mm × 32mm, USB to two-wire serial debug bridge (Arm Serial Wire Debug supported by default), USB to UART bridge, Compatible with the CMSIS-DAP standard, Works with OpenOCD and other tools supporting CMSIS-DAP, Follows the Raspberry Pi 3-pin Debug Connector Specification, Includes a high-quality transparent plastic case, Includes a USB cable and three debug cables: 3-pin JST connector to 3-pin JST connector cable; 3-pin JST connector to 0.1-inch header (female); 3-pin JST connector to 0.1-inch header (male) and Nominal I/O voltage: 3.3V.

“Perhaps you’re using a high-level interpreted programming language, like Python, where debug capabilities are built directly into the runtime environment. Or perhaps you’re using a low-level compiled programming language, like C, but your program is running under an operating system, like Linux; here, a debugger like gdb, often running on the same machine, can interact with your program as it runs, to provide these same capabilities.”

“The microcontroller itself provides a Debug Port (DP), which is connected externally to pins on the package, and internally to each AP in the system. RP2040 exposes its DP via a low-pin-count Serial Wire Debug (SWD) port: by talking the SWD protocol over this port, a host computer can control each core’s AP, in order to debug a program running on the core.”

For more information and full specifications, purchasing and availability jump over to the official Raspberry Pi store by following the link below.

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