I'm in need of a new J-TAG unit for debugging Cortex-M3 and M4 boards.
Of the following three, which has best cost/performance ratio:
Segger J-Link
CodeRed Red Probe+
Rowley CrossConnect
I'm using Rowley CrossWorks for ARM as my development environment.
Best Cost/Performance J-TAG Unit
Started by ●March 9, 2012
Reply by ●March 9, 20122012-03-09
A thought,
you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can save $100?
Got CrossWorks -> use CrossConnect.
The last time I checked Red Probe worked with RedSuite and nothing else.
Segger is the most flexible J-TAG unit on the market and works with pretty much every IDE.
So, if you want to invest thousands of $$$ to get a new professional IDE, how important is the JTAG hardware?!
Just my 2 cents
--- In l..., "Jerry" wrote:
>
> I'm in need of a new J-TAG unit for debugging Cortex-M3 and M4 boards.
>
> Of the following three, which has best cost/performance ratio:
>
> Segger J-Link
> CodeRed Red Probe+
> Rowley CrossConnect
>
> I'm using Rowley CrossWorks for ARM as my development environment.
>
you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can save $100?
Got CrossWorks -> use CrossConnect.
The last time I checked Red Probe worked with RedSuite and nothing else.
Segger is the most flexible J-TAG unit on the market and works with pretty much every IDE.
So, if you want to invest thousands of $$$ to get a new professional IDE, how important is the JTAG hardware?!
Just my 2 cents
--- In l..., "Jerry" wrote:
>
> I'm in need of a new J-TAG unit for debugging Cortex-M3 and M4 boards.
>
> Of the following three, which has best cost/performance ratio:
>
> Segger J-Link
> CodeRed Red Probe+
> Rowley CrossConnect
>
> I'm using Rowley CrossWorks for ARM as my development environment.
>
Reply by ●March 9, 20122012-03-09
Get CooCox, its free.
Just my quarter of a cent.
Em 9 de mar de 2012 20:12, Bob T escreveu:
> **
> A thought,
> you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can save $100?
> Got CrossWorks -> use CrossConnect.
> The last time I checked Red Probe worked with RedSuite and nothing else.
> Segger is the most flexible J-TAG unit on the market and works with pretty
> much every IDE.
>
> So, if you want to invest thousands of $$$ to get a new professional IDE,
> how important is the JTAG hardware?!
>
> Just my 2 cents
> --- In l..., "Jerry" wrote:
> >
> > I'm in need of a new J-TAG unit for debugging Cortex-M3 and M4 boards.
> >
> > Of the following three, which has best cost/performance ratio:
> >
> > Segger J-Link
> > CodeRed Red Probe+
> > Rowley CrossConnect
> >
> > I'm using Rowley CrossWorks for ARM as my development environment.
> >
>
Just my quarter of a cent.
Em 9 de mar de 2012 20:12, Bob T escreveu:
> **
> A thought,
> you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can save $100?
> Got CrossWorks -> use CrossConnect.
> The last time I checked Red Probe worked with RedSuite and nothing else.
> Segger is the most flexible J-TAG unit on the market and works with pretty
> much every IDE.
>
> So, if you want to invest thousands of $$$ to get a new professional IDE,
> how important is the JTAG hardware?!
>
> Just my 2 cents
> --- In l..., "Jerry" wrote:
> >
> > I'm in need of a new J-TAG unit for debugging Cortex-M3 and M4 boards.
> >
> > Of the following three, which has best cost/performance ratio:
> >
> > Segger J-Link
> > CodeRed Red Probe+
> > Rowley CrossConnect
> >
> > I'm using Rowley CrossWorks for ARM as my development environment.
> >
>
Reply by ●March 10, 20122012-03-10
--- In l..., "Bob T" wrote:
> A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can save $100?
That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a reasonable amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of supported targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I don't want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support, hence the short list in my original post. I've had some real dog debugger units before that took forever to single step a line of code, and want to avoid that this time.
> A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can save $100?
That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a reasonable amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of supported targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I don't want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support, hence the short list in my original post. I've had some real dog debugger units before that took forever to single step a line of code, and want to avoid that this time.
Reply by ●March 10, 20122012-03-10
Il 10/03/2012 07:37, Jerry ha scritto:
Hi Jerry,
I can say that if you need also a development board you could buy one
offering J-Link Lite in bundle (you can buy it only if you buy a
development board). It is the best value you can obtain virtually a no
cost. Also if you don't need a development board it is the best
opportunity if you pay less then $75.
>
>
> --- In l... ,
> "Bob T" wrote:
> > A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you
> can save $100?
>
> That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial
> license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a
> reasonable amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
>
> I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of
> supported targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
>
> I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I
> don't want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support,
> hence the short list in my original post. I've had some real dog
> debugger units before that took forever to single step a line of code,
> and want to avoid that this time.
Hi Jerry,
I can say that if you need also a development board you could buy one
offering J-Link Lite in bundle (you can buy it only if you buy a
development board). It is the best value you can obtain virtually a no
cost. Also if you don't need a development board it is the best
opportunity if you pay less then $75.
>
>
> --- In l... ,
> "Bob T" wrote:
> > A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you
> can save $100?
>
> That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial
> license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a
> reasonable amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
>
> I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of
> supported targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
>
> I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I
> don't want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support,
> hence the short list in my original post. I've had some real dog
> debugger units before that took forever to single step a line of code,
> and want to avoid that this time.
Reply by ●March 10, 20122012-03-10
If you want the debugger for non commercial usage I think you should consider
the Jlink EDU version, it cost 50 euro and includes the flash breakpoint for
free.
http://www.segger.com/j-link-edu.html
Unfortunately it says that the license doesn't include support (but you can ask questions in seggers forum).
Alex
On 03/10/2012 08:37 AM, Jerry wrote:
> --- In l... ,
> "Bob T" wrote:
> > A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you
> can save $100?
>
> That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial
> license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a
> reasonable amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
>
> I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of
> supported targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
>
> I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I
> don't want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support,
> hence the short list in my original post. I've had some real dog
> debugger units before that took forever to single step a line of code,
> and want to avoid that this time.
http://www.segger.com/j-link-edu.html
Unfortunately it says that the license doesn't include support (but you can ask questions in seggers forum).
Alex
On 03/10/2012 08:37 AM, Jerry wrote:
> --- In l... ,
> "Bob T" wrote:
> > A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you
> can save $100?
>
> That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial
> license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a
> reasonable amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
>
> I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of
> supported targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
>
> I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I
> don't want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support,
> hence the short list in my original post. I've had some real dog
> debugger units before that took forever to single step a line of code,
> and want to avoid that this time.
Reply by ●March 10, 20122012-03-10
Actually it's not just the JTAG interface that slows down debugging,
it's
often more due to the debugger GUI itself.
I had the same problem with GNU based tools working on the Sparc-Lite a few
years ago and eventually wrote my own debugger interface to overcome the
issue.
The problem I saw was that GDB itself does not handle the display of the
variables, the GUI determines what is displayed and what needs to be read
each time the display is updated, it sends these requests to GDB which then
interrogates the target and returns the response.
With a lot of variables displayed each one was requested as a separate
transaction and the issue was latency for GDB to access the target,
particularly over USB since each access requires a command to the debugger
to read a location and then waiting for a response.
With USB regardless of the actual target interface speed there was a latency
of several ms to send the request and get the response, so with a large
amount of information displayed it made the debugger painfully slow. It was
particularly bad because GDB did not pipeline requests to the target, each
request from the GUI was serviced before the next request was accepted.
I noticed this because I used a serial HW debug interface using RS232 with
dedicated HW in the target for accessing the bus, with a standard uart the
performance was OK, but with a USB uart interface it slowed to a crawl, the
issue is the latency imposed by USB which is polled at 1ms ( although USB 2
can support 250 us poll rate ).
A read request for 1 word required 5 bytes transfer to target and 4 bytes
response, i.e. 90 bits. At 1MBaud this should take 90 us, but with USB it
increased to around 5ms, around 2% of the rate when not using USB.
My solution was to re-write the debugger interface between GDB and the
target so each request made a larger request to the target and cached the
data, subsequent requests that hit the cache were then returned immediately,
this made a huge difference to the performance. It works particularly well
with C++ since you tend to find use of classes causes you to group the data
that you will be interested in together so the caching really improves
performance.
Sadly this problem at the time was common to all debugger GUI's which is one
of the reasons I never use GNU based tools any more.
But, if you don't want to pay for a commercial product with a more
intelligent GUI / target interface then you can also consider re-writing the
target interface, or simply minimizing the amount of data displayed in the
debug window. This should make it less dependent on that actual target
interface performance.
Regards
Phil.
From: l... [mailto:l...] On Behalf Of
Jerry
Sent: 10 March 2012 06:37
To: l...
Subject: [lpc2000] Re: Best Cost/Performance J-TAG Unit
--- In l... , "Bob T"
wrote:
> A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can
save $100?
That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial
license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a reasonable
amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of supported
targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I don't
want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support, hence the short
list in my original post. I've had some real dog debugger units before that
took forever to single step a line of code, and want to avoid that this
time.
often more due to the debugger GUI itself.
I had the same problem with GNU based tools working on the Sparc-Lite a few
years ago and eventually wrote my own debugger interface to overcome the
issue.
The problem I saw was that GDB itself does not handle the display of the
variables, the GUI determines what is displayed and what needs to be read
each time the display is updated, it sends these requests to GDB which then
interrogates the target and returns the response.
With a lot of variables displayed each one was requested as a separate
transaction and the issue was latency for GDB to access the target,
particularly over USB since each access requires a command to the debugger
to read a location and then waiting for a response.
With USB regardless of the actual target interface speed there was a latency
of several ms to send the request and get the response, so with a large
amount of information displayed it made the debugger painfully slow. It was
particularly bad because GDB did not pipeline requests to the target, each
request from the GUI was serviced before the next request was accepted.
I noticed this because I used a serial HW debug interface using RS232 with
dedicated HW in the target for accessing the bus, with a standard uart the
performance was OK, but with a USB uart interface it slowed to a crawl, the
issue is the latency imposed by USB which is polled at 1ms ( although USB 2
can support 250 us poll rate ).
A read request for 1 word required 5 bytes transfer to target and 4 bytes
response, i.e. 90 bits. At 1MBaud this should take 90 us, but with USB it
increased to around 5ms, around 2% of the rate when not using USB.
My solution was to re-write the debugger interface between GDB and the
target so each request made a larger request to the target and cached the
data, subsequent requests that hit the cache were then returned immediately,
this made a huge difference to the performance. It works particularly well
with C++ since you tend to find use of classes causes you to group the data
that you will be interested in together so the caching really improves
performance.
Sadly this problem at the time was common to all debugger GUI's which is one
of the reasons I never use GNU based tools any more.
But, if you don't want to pay for a commercial product with a more
intelligent GUI / target interface then you can also consider re-writing the
target interface, or simply minimizing the amount of data displayed in the
debug window. This should make it less dependent on that actual target
interface performance.
Regards
Phil.
From: l... [mailto:l...] On Behalf Of
Jerry
Sent: 10 March 2012 06:37
To: l...
Subject: [lpc2000] Re: Best Cost/Performance J-TAG Unit
--- In l... , "Bob T"
wrote:
> A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can
save $100?
That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial
license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a reasonable
amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of supported
targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I don't
want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support, hence the short
list in my original post. I've had some real dog debugger units before that
took forever to single step a line of code, and want to avoid that this
time.
Reply by ●March 10, 20122012-03-10
I just bought an Olimex ARM-USB-OCD. This is very cool, and only $70.
Not only does it give you JTAG, but RS-232 port also, and even DC volt output: 5/9/12.
Ideal for me: I run my JTAG, my UART console terminal interface, and power my product (12V) all from this one pod.
All from a single USB line. Cut out 2 extra cables! I love this pod!
Also, this supports OpenOCD/GDB which is the open source generic debugging interface.
Probably the way of the future, certainly low cost using the YAGARTO tool setup now.
I am talking to the UltraEdit guys right now about getting them to support OpenOCD.
They have a great editor, the best, powerful IDE, which would be fantastic if it supported OpenOCD debugging.
You can buy their IDE/Editor for $80. I hate Eclipse, it sucks as a code editor.
Chris.
Not only does it give you JTAG, but RS-232 port also, and even DC volt output: 5/9/12.
Ideal for me: I run my JTAG, my UART console terminal interface, and power my product (12V) all from this one pod.
All from a single USB line. Cut out 2 extra cables! I love this pod!
Also, this supports OpenOCD/GDB which is the open source generic debugging interface.
Probably the way of the future, certainly low cost using the YAGARTO tool setup now.
I am talking to the UltraEdit guys right now about getting them to support OpenOCD.
They have a great editor, the best, powerful IDE, which would be fantastic if it supported OpenOCD debugging.
You can buy their IDE/Editor for $80. I hate Eclipse, it sucks as a code editor.
Chris.
Reply by ●March 10, 20122012-03-10
--- In l..., "Jerry" wrote:
>
> --- In l..., "Bob T" wrote:
> > A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can save $100?
>
> That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a reasonable amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
>
> I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of supported targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
>
> I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I don't want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support, hence the short list in my original post. I've had some real dog debugger units before that took forever to single step a line of code, and want to avoid that this time.
>
I'm a hobbyist too and I'm using CrossWorks as well. As J-TAG I have and use a CrossConnect and a J-Link EDU.
My experience is: Both work well and reliable. Advantage of J-Link is endless number of breakpoints and as J-Link EDU it's quite affordable. Advantage of CrossConnect is the remarkable speed. You will notice the difference to the J-Link quite well not only in loading but also in single stepping with the same IDE (CrossWorks). Therefore I mostly use the CrossConnect.
CodeRed Red Probe: No experience, I don't have one.
Helmut
>
> --- In l..., "Bob T" wrote:
> > A thought, you are asking thousands of people in this group how you can save $100?
>
> That's right, I am. I'm a hobbyist, and the "personal" non-commercial license for CrossWorks is only $150, not thousands, so saving a reasonable amount of money on a J-TAG would certainly be nice too.
>
> I have CrossWorks open on this machine and looking at the list of supported targets, it lists CodeRed Red Probe+.
>
> I'm willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good J-TAG unit, and I don't want a Chinese knock-off clone, but something with support, hence the short list in my original post. I've had some real dog debugger units before that took forever to single step a line of code, and want to avoid that this time.
>
I'm a hobbyist too and I'm using CrossWorks as well. As J-TAG I have and use a CrossConnect and a J-Link EDU.
My experience is: Both work well and reliable. Advantage of J-Link is endless number of breakpoints and as J-Link EDU it's quite affordable. Advantage of CrossConnect is the remarkable speed. You will notice the difference to the J-Link quite well not only in loading but also in single stepping with the same IDE (CrossWorks). Therefore I mostly use the CrossConnect.
CodeRed Red Probe: No experience, I don't have one.
Helmut
Reply by ●March 10, 20122012-03-10
--- In l..., "helmutbitter" wrote:
> I'm a hobbyist too and I'm using CrossWorks as well. As J-TAG I have and use a CrossConnect and a J-Link EDU.
> My experience is: Both work well and reliable. Advantage of J-Link is endless number of breakpoints and as J-Link EDU it's quite affordable. Advantage of CrossConnect is the remarkable speed. You will notice the difference to the J-Link quite well not only in loading but also in single stepping with the same IDE (CrossWorks). Therefore I mostly use the CrossConnect.
Sounds like the CrossConnect is the way to go. I'm using a Segger J-LINK right now, but it's borrowed from a friend and he's been politely asking for it back for some time now. ;-) I'll start saving my pennies and as soon as I have to surrender the J-LINK to my friend I'll put in an order for a CrossConnect.
I'm very impressed by the speed of CrossWorks when debugging ARM code. It steps so fast through code that the delays are imperceptible. It's the best $150 I ever spent on a tool. The interface is much nicer and cleaner than Eclipse or MPLAB too.
This is in big contrast to my experience with MPLAB and MPLAB X on the high-end PICs where stepping through code is slow and painful.
> I'm a hobbyist too and I'm using CrossWorks as well. As J-TAG I have and use a CrossConnect and a J-Link EDU.
> My experience is: Both work well and reliable. Advantage of J-Link is endless number of breakpoints and as J-Link EDU it's quite affordable. Advantage of CrossConnect is the remarkable speed. You will notice the difference to the J-Link quite well not only in loading but also in single stepping with the same IDE (CrossWorks). Therefore I mostly use the CrossConnect.
Sounds like the CrossConnect is the way to go. I'm using a Segger J-LINK right now, but it's borrowed from a friend and he's been politely asking for it back for some time now. ;-) I'll start saving my pennies and as soon as I have to surrender the J-LINK to my friend I'll put in an order for a CrossConnect.
I'm very impressed by the speed of CrossWorks when debugging ARM code. It steps so fast through code that the delays are imperceptible. It's the best $150 I ever spent on a tool. The interface is much nicer and cleaner than Eclipse or MPLAB too.
This is in big contrast to my experience with MPLAB and MPLAB X on the high-end PICs where stepping through code is slow and painful.