esp-serial-dbg - debugging of esp-hal based applications via serial

About

This is still work in progress! At least the contained examples should work fine on ESP32, ESP32-S3 and ESP32-C3. For ESP32-S2 it currently seems that the GDB server has some issues.

This is a way to do some basic debugging via a serial connection on ESP32, ESP32-S3 and ESP32-C3 and ESP32-S2 without additional hardware when developing code with esp-hal.

Basic Usage

• make sure you have the GDB command line application suitable for your target installed and in your system-path
• add the esp-serial-dbg dependency to your binary crate (esp-serial-dbg = { package = "esp-serial-dbg", git = "https://github.com/bjoernQ/esp-serial-dbg.git" })
• initialize the library early in your main.rs(esp_serial_dbg::init(Serial::new(peripherals.UART0));)
• flash your application as usual
• run the espdbg command line utility (e.g. espdbg gdb esp32s3 and optionally pass the serial port to use)
• make sure you have installed the Native Debug extension in version 0.25.1 in Visual Studio Code (version 0.26.0 does NOT work)
• add a launch configuration similar to those contained in the examples
• launch a debug session

Currently before each debug session you should restart the target and restart espdbg - this will be improved in future.

espdbg uses the log crate and env logger - you can get a lot of information by setting the env-var RUST_LOG to info or trace

While this enabled basic debugging the general approach has some technical limitations! If you need more advanced debugging you should use a JTAG debugger with OpenOCD or probe-rs (probe-rs currently only supports ESP32-C3)

Debugging via JTAG/Serial is NOT supported (i.e. the ESP32-C3-DevKit-RUST-1 is NOT supported)

License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.