All you really need is a knife, fork, soldering iron,
oscilloscope and program loader. A LED or two on GPIO helps a
lot. You can replace the knife and fork with a small Swiss army
knife.

Yes, it's possible to do it without a JTAG unit. If the CPU chip
doesn't have a program loader, then a JTAG unit becomes almost
essential. We brought up an Intel SA1100 design just using a
JTAG gadget to program the Flash. Everything else was debugged
with the oscilloscope and LEDs. Even though we sell JTAG units,
I have to say that once we have our software kernel running,
LEDs and an oscilloscope tell you far more than anything else.
With the exception of chip bugs, the failures are in your source
code, and are therefore wetware failures.

Stephen
--
Stephen Pelc, s...@mpeforth.com
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

Hi,

You can try to use an embedded stub to communicate with gdb (on your host).
This was the way to debug before JTAG debugger arrived.

Check http://sourceforge.net/projects/gdbstubs

Best regards,
Eric

----- Original Message -----
From: Ali Beirami
To: A...
Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 7:09 PM
Subject: [AT91SAM] Is it possible to fully debug a program without JTAG interface?

Hi Fellas,

I am working on a project and no JTAG debugger is available for me. The current approach I'm using is simply printing variables to DBGU port and frustrating trial/error process.

There are three wires connecting to my device now ( beside supply voltage) that are capable of data transfer : DBGU (Currently Debugging), USB (ISP and Data) and Ethernet (Data) interfaces which are all fully functional and I'm quite familiar using them.

Is it possible to use this wires (along with a application in pc ) as a functional debugger? I mean BPs, trace and single step execution ,... and NO JTAG DONGLE AT ALL.

I searched a lot and there are a few evidences (like http://www.oasistechsol.com/starter_edition.aspx) that it is possible but I cant find any clear instructions.

Thanx.

Hi Fellas,

I am working on a project and no JTAG debugger is available for me. The current approach I'm using is simply printing variables to DBGU port and frustrating trial/error process.

There are three wires connecting to my device now ( beside supply voltage) that are capable of data transfer : DBGU (Currently Debugging), USB (ISP and Data) and Ethernet (Data) interfaces which are all fully functional and I'm quite familiar using them.

Is it possible to use this wires (along with a application in pc ) as a functional debugger? I mean BPs, trace and single step execution ,... and NO JTAG DONGLE AT ALL.

I searched a lot and there are a few evidences (like http://www.oasistechsol.com/starter_edition.aspx) that it is possible but I cant find any clear instructions.

Thanx.