C++ Debugging for the ESP32 in Visual Studio 

Love the car joke. Heard it in a slightly different format, but I like yours better. Now, a mathematician, an astronomer and an engineer were all sentenced to death by guillotine many years back. Each was given the opportunity to be face up or down for the act. The mathematician was first and wanted to be face down so as to not see his fate coming. As the blade was coming down it stopped inches from his neck and, as is tradition, this was seen as divine intervention and his life was spared. Next up was the astronomer who wanted to look upwards to the heavens and was placed, thusly. Again, the blade dropped but stopped inches from his neck and his life was also spared. Finally the engineer; He wished to be placed face up and as the blade was raised up to its starting position he pointed up and said "hey, I think I see your problem."

For watchdogs, I love the terminology I heard once on how to use a watchdog. The watchdog requires you to "pet" it periodically, like you would a real dog. You keep petting it and it stays happy. If you fail to pet it in time, then it reacts with either a "bark" (generates an interrupt), or a "bite" (resets the system). (The on-chip watchdog timers were configurable on whether they should bark or bite).

I was inspired after direct chip programing on KK2 boards for quad control systems with spectrum chanal hopping (DSM2). Debugging (5 days) was done with a 2 line display and audio beeps. Hence I have NO friends to share this video with. I am always inspired by your level of conferdance Dave. "To the novice there is many choices, To the Expert there is but few".

I've been looking for a good video about how to do this for a long time. Thanks again Dave.

It’s wonderful to behold! I started computing in the days of cards and paper tape editing, turnaround times in hours! Debugging often through dump cracking - quite a pleasure although consumed too many trees! Using DDT for assembler debugging on PDP11/RSX was a great step forward, although tricky for real-time multithreaded stuff. This is just magic!

Thank you again Dave for a great, nicely made video that helps open a number of doors for peeps like me that love to do this sort of thing. I went from PlatformIO to ESP-IDF in hopes to debug my ESP32-S3-DEVKITC-1 v1.1 and failed miserably a number of times. I even tried using Espressif's IDE and failed some more. This failed crawl down a number of related rabbit holes took so long that I cannot even remember why I ventured away from PlatformIO in the first place. So I will go back to PlatformIO and try it with the latest Wrover Kit, the ESP-WROVER-KIT-VE I just ordered. This will help me learn all the settings and technics for debugging at least, and maybe help me get the S3 working under the same environment. Anyway, thank you sir for another awesome contribution!! I appreciate it!

More ESP videos please! I really enjoy them!

I saw a post on RU-vid regarding building an ISS tracker. The project used an STM microprocessor. Whilst an overview was given, details were not. After struggling for some time, I bit the bullet and used the debugger and discovered that some modules weren't being compiled correctly and had to be forced to be compiled which of course solved the problem. Without the debugger I think I would have ditched the project and written off the time. Thanks goodness for the Debugger!

Thanks for the tip Dave, this is extremely relevant to a project that I'm currently working on. I think I may just have to get one of those ESP-WROVER-KIT-VE boards to dev my project on.

Finally got my kit after a few weeks, and set it up exactly like your video. Works 100%. Bit of a scare with the zadiag program, as it timed out after 5 minutes and said it failed, but still installed the driver. BTW, I have an I7 8th gen ACER notebook for my home unit, and it took 9.75 sec to compile. Thanks!

I don't know where they are. I just enjoy you explaining stuff. (Got the mugs ordered but the freight to Australia sux) Thanks for your time and effort Will

Thank you, Dave, compare with other people's videos on this matter with so much complexity yours worked on my case with ease 🙏

Thanks Dave. You have inspired me to have another go at debugging with the esp32. Bye bye Serial.print("I'm here")

Thanks Dave! My company sells test systems. Our systems have lots of watchdogs in shared memory which are basically counters to record the amount of time since communication with something was successful. Thus we "reset" them to 0 with our device control programs and the main test executive program increments the counters. If the counters get too high, because the device froze or a program crashed, we shut the system down.

When debugging the ESP32, keep in mind that you can only set 2 breakpoints at any time. If you single step, one is needed for that. So you are left with a single breakpoint. If you set more breakpoints, they will be silently ignored. This limitation does not exist on desktop systems as they run code from RAM and can modify the code to create breakpoints. MCUs other than the ESP32 usually offer 6 or 8 hardware breakpoints.

ThANK YOU!! Serious, Dave, thank you for making this video!

Lol. Love the Friendly Giant bit at the end! You must be Canadian! 🍁

I've been awaiting such a video...

I just wanted to start development on the ESP32 for an homeproject. What a coincidence! :) Great video thanks alot.

"If you're -not- curious, I'm gonna tell you anyway..." Dave, you constantly crack me up. (By the way - I loved your book.)

thanks for the superb debugging lecture

Finally it works for me. You saved me a ton of time. Thanks. My compilation time was 4,47 sec. with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz 1.50 GHz, 16GB RAM. ctrl-shift-b didn't work for me. Instead I used the Build Button on the PlatformIO sideboard.

You appeared on my feed about a month ago, maybe 2, at this point I'm fairly sure I'd watch anything you put out. It's always a joy to listen to someone who has a passion for what they do, the high quality level is just a bonus! Keep up the amazing work, I look forward to seeing more :D

This is awesome, thanks so much!!!

Thanks for this, being a professional software developer I always found the Arduino IDE to be frustratingly inadequate and it hides too many details that I wanted to see. I will try it again using a proper development setup.

So THIS is why I sold all my ebay stock of ESP-Prog boards! Nice ONE!

Thanks for the video

Great video. Thanks!

can you do an episode on the esp32 wifi NINA? It's inbuilt into the arduino uno wifi rev2 but seems to work different than other esp32 chips and isn't compatitble with some software

Nice work on the Friendly Giant setup. 👍Next up: start videos by crawling through a log, or checking the tickle trunk!

I'm running into issues using the debugger with my esp... and whcih VCP Driver should I be downloading.. I tried the zadig, but nothing shows up. So I guess I must already have that because I can upload to the ESP, just no debugging is working.. :\ I can't seem to get ftdi working either.

The ESP32-C3 (Single Risc-V Core) shows it has JTAG/USB support, but can it also be debugged using PlatformIO and even VSCode? Or would the C3 need to be flashed with something that enables SWD debugging? BTW, in terms of debugging, any thoughts between VSCode and Visual Studio + VisualGDB ?

Dave, can you do a video on what a driver is? Along with a code example?

For anyone with board = esp32-s3-devkitc-1 (or similar) : you can get source level debugging just by connecting a second usb cable from the pc to the board and adding these settings to platformio.ini debug_tool = esp-builtin debug_init_break = tbreak setup debug_speed = 5000 I've just spent the weekend trying to get an eps-prog board working with one of my ESP32-S3s and eventually realised the board I have has built in JTAG debugging !!! Not sure how this method compares to Dave's, I've only just got it working and am yet to use it in anger, but it's hitting breakpoints I set (eventually).

As someone who only really has microchip experience I’m just getting into ESP32 and it’s a bit of a learning curve. I’m used to programming in assembler on microchip products but am getting back into C which I haven’t used for many many years and using the Arduino IDE z which is really nice and gentle getting me into a new SoC. I’ve got platformIO and Studio code setup and need to switch to it …. It’s just all of the tools that is a bit of a nightmare to find my way around.

Brilliant! I guess I’m one of those rare people looking for this.

I did the same things you did to create and build the empty project. It took 3.72s on my Arch Linux (btw) machine, with an i5 8400. Although I wasn't encoding 4K video. Is the 4K encoding that heavy to make your compile time slower than my i5 could do? Or is it Windows/Linux overhead differences?

For a fair comparison, I started encoding some 4k video in OBS Studio and run a couple of additional tasks... 3.93 seconds. Also, you're my new hero, Dave!

Love this!

Can you explain the chairs at the end, seen it many time but I haven't worked it out yet

I think it's cool and as a hobbyist programmer/ maker it interests me but not 100 cad interests when I'm on a tight budget.

Great video Dave. Now can you do a video on a color printer and allow printing in black with a missing color cartridge? Right to repair with a practical problem.

Dave thanks for all your content, are you planning creating same video for raspberry pi ?

At work, I think we've always pet the watchdog. Can't recall hearing anything else.

Video is so awesome , Could you show some example about Timer, task 1, 2,3 in same time, Thank you so much Sir

how difficult would it be to do an Arduino style platform IO for.....a quad core (possibly a million cores for that matter) using the the Raspberry PiZero!!!!

Thanks for this video. Im programming in Circuitpython. Do you think it would be possible as well? Coding without debugging is kind of a bummer, at a certain complexity of code. Or should i change language? I then would prefer RUST… Anybody with experience?

Will you make a video showing the ESP-PROG ?

Great job on the video, Thank you. I find I need to get things lined up (just right) and from what I can see I can only debug what is inside or called from loop() and not setup(). Perhaps I need to work on my setup. On or about time index 11:42 you display you platform.ini. How much of that code is required for the debugger? build_flags = -DWROVERKIT=1 -DDEBUG = 1 -DUSE_SCREEN = 1 -DUSE_PSRAM=0 -DBOARD_HAS_PSRAM=0 -std=gnu++17 -Ofast -mfix-esp32-psram-cache-issue build_type = debug debug_tool = ftdi upload_protocol = ftdi debug_init_break =

Yes! Brilliant video, finally a real solution to debug my esp32 projects! great! Ordered a board, diving in deep. But... on MacOS, JTAG seems not to work. I know you are, besides Windwos and Linux, a Mac user as well, any luck getting this working on MacOS Monterey using the ESP-WROVER kit and PlatformIO?

Can we debug with the IDF in just the same way? I just tossed out PIO in favor of all the naturally supported build tools/processes.

Dave can you do a video on Visual Studio? Likes, dislikes, maybe build a small exe with it and review the process.

I suppose we can't really setup the classic visual studio for this... can you explain why code instead of the standard visual studio?

LOVE the video, but where can I find more info?

Thanks for this. Very niche, but very interesting. At time of writing 41000 views. Some theaters have to do with less viewers.

Nice, tried this about a year ago with a separate FTDI board, succeeded only once to get it to work. After that, endless mucking about with the driver... It seems that platform IO has made this a bit easier.

Great intro joke man! 😂👍

What happened at the end there?

What about compiler optimzation?

I have zero people I know that would be interested in this. When they ask what I do (make shit move through programming) I usually respond, “IT type stuff!” Shuts em up and I get to listen to how many cows were born in the spring…

arduino build drag racing?

I wonder if Dave has ever used Forth, that language was a plug in to the c64, his first computer. I loved Forth, I felt all stuck up 'cause I wasn't using Basic.

Im on a R5 3600, lets see how fast it is! Ill load up prime95 in a VM to cause some load ;)

Whatever happened to the good old days of VB6 where you could code and debug at the same time. THANKS for this Dave

I have often heard form my collage prof " feed the watch dog b4 it barks" but from now i will use kick the watchdogs as it's even more funny to say 🤣😂😉 Great Video Dave 👍....

Can you do a chat about the backdoor/exploit for the ESP32 please?

funny how computers are supposedly the most deterministic things in existence but a programmer ALWAYS runs his programs twice minimum when something doesn't work

Where I learned, we used to feed the watchdog :D

It never occurred to the first person who chose Plumber as his family name "What if some descendants of mine choose a different job than plumber"?

What about Mac?

12:42 I imagine you're catching some AdaFruit fans... I'm not on Discord, but they have one... maybe somewhere to post?

nice =D

You don't kick the watch dog. You have to "walk the watchdog" every so often, or it gets grumpy.

Next up. Dave codes multi-thread multi-user on an stock MSX with 32kB banks swapped.. (/slaps self. Dave not intro retro computing. Still daydreaming)

Get 1080 ti and just do hardware encoding if you don't already have a graphics card. :)

The Error you saw with the USB LIB when he was connecting to the device for debugging is a bug in OpenOCD 0.10, which is what PlatfromIO is using (I guess). OpenOCD 0.11 is a newer version which doesnt have this bug. Just FYI.

For me it takes about 10s. Ryzen 5 2600 - 16Gb Ram

You can call it "feed the watchdog".

lol, we 'pet' the watchdog

The programmer would push up the hill and do it again to make sure they can recreate the issue before trying to fix it.

It's Zadig not Zadiag...!

I was gonna say "feed" the watchdog, but "pet" is even better 👍 Mind you - I'm not even a dog person, but kicking the watchdog doesn't evoke a feeling of serene coding zen 😂

breakpoint should be a human right!

I don't get why STM32 is not popular. Their STLink debugger can be bought from Chinese men for $2, or on official cheap dev boards for $5. It works with every µC, not only dev units. It offers full debug including step-by-step, breakpoints, live checking registers values, and more. And it works without any hacks. Their HAL is also great. It is not as simple as Arduino (but still very simple), but way way way more powerful.

My machine (Ryzen 3600X, Gentoo Linux) takes just under 3 seconds to build the empty project

"Today, we'll be using the lighter and snappier alternative known as VS Code" Ahem.... it is a bit indicative of modern bloatware when a source code editor written completely in JavaScript running inside a Web Browser (easily amassing 100's of MB of binary executable code) is referred to as the "lighter and snappier" alternative. But yeah, it is snappier than VS, but that tells more about how dog slow VS is than how fast VS Code is.

We "feed the watchdog"

I’ve always fed them.

7:40 --> fastest compiling in the wild west

*zadig

Zadig not Zadiag :)

I've done esp32 debugging with the esp-prog but single stepping is sooo sloooww

Zadig - not Zadiag

Woah woah woah. Whats wrong with printf debugging? 🤣🤣🤣🤣

“…steam-lessly transition…”???

:D

indefinable murmur

So when AI can do your job what will you do. When memory was very limited you had to manually remember all your addresses for your Hardware those wore the days.

Former microsnuff employer ? Shame on you..

i dont understand ....open source ......why are you trying to get people to go the other way....when took time and effort ....to make something that already works