Troubleshooting tools for firmware and hardware.
At HDDG17, Alvaro Prieto discusses common and moderately priced tools that help troubleshoot custom FW and HW.
Supplyframe’s mission is to create more access to information about electronics design and manufacturing. As such, we do a meetup in San Francisco called, Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic. These events include talks by industry experts in hardware and software. The speakers are often building hardware for recreation or as part of their employment. The common thread is that they want to give a view “under the hood”.
At HDDG17, Alvaro Prieto gave a talk that revolves around his current projects (a custom cheese cave controller), past projects (hacking tiny quadcopters) and the tools used for getting each working properly.
Alvaro covers a range of tools for creating and troubleshooting new devices, including a custom one of his own making (Silta). This is a board that uses the STM32 platform and a python wrapper to make a prototyping platform for easily talking to sensors and plotting their output.
Each of these tools are useful for ensuring custom hardware is brought up successfully, especially in conjunction with the firmware programming (which can confound which piece of the project is at fault). Here is a non-exhaustive list of the devices mentioned:
- Saleae Logic Analyzer
- Analog Discovery 2
- Beagle 480
- GoodFET/GreatFET
- Bus Pirate
- Bus Blaster
- Silta
- Black Magic Probe
Learn more
See all of Alvaro’s publicly available firmware and hardware on his GitHub repo.
