Excellent, exactly the same editor and way of working through my C# code windows program in Studio 2017.

This is one of the more expensive channels :-) Just made an order of 1 esp-prog. Not being able to do in-circuit debugging has always been a show stopper me doing more advanced programs on ESP and ATMEL micros.

Thank you Andreas & everyone who is involved in making this possible! Got my first ESP32 last week. I know I'm late but Arduino & ESP8266 & TI Launchpad was enough before. But now I'm hooked on the ESP32 drug! =) And there's sooo many boards to try! Thank you once again. =)

Your videos and all the work you put in are so valuable to us Andreas! I save a ton of time with your shared experience. Thanks a lot.

This is one of the best videos done Andreas. We really hope you could go into much more details about this topic in future. We learnt a lot from this video. Thanks a lot. Bless you.

Thanks Andreas! Nice to know that PIO debugger is become free! PS: 14-15 September there will be CERN Open Days and they are really worth a trip!

Great video, yes, want one. Also you could use the "static" keyword to keep your local variable in its associated function without making it a global. It will then keep its value between calls.

Wow! Thanks Andreas, always wondered about this stuff, time to go shopping! (Big thanks to the platformIO team too.... )

Possibly the most important video you've made so far. This will release thousands from the 'irons' of the current environment.

OMG Andreas! This is HUGE! I've tried doing this before with a different debugger with limited success. Thank you for sharing your success path! Ten thumbs ups!!

Ah the 'bleeding edge' and despite the warnings I know I'm going to fall down the same holes as you. Concise and inspiring as ever, thanks Andreas.

Unbelievably cool and informative video man! Well done! Exactly what I have been looking for, for years! Just in time. Love your clear, direct, and still detailed style! Long lives your channel and you!

My life just changed significantly. Thanks!!!

I always your videos to the very end.... my whole family loves the "BYE" at the end.

Absolutely awesome and already placed the order at Aliexpress. Until now I was excepting that debugging these microcontollers is just out range and will never work. Will stay on Patreon, because these are the videos with really big value.

Big thank you! -- this is will take me from the Arduino side over to PlatformIO

Thanks Andreas, already got the board a few week ago, finally got some time to install and test. Just got the the debugger running.

Always finding new interesting videos on your channel - a "swiss mountain" of information it is

Thanks for making this video. It's so hard to explain how easy debugging can be.

Thanks so much for this Andreas! Saved me a heap of time getting up and running with this little debug module. Such great content!

Thanks mate. This is the one thing that has really held me back - not just useful for debugging, but also a great way to learn and experiment. I hope you're getting a commission - I just bought one.

Andreas, as an influencer, the more you promote useful tools like this one, more available and cheap they will become. Thank you so much for this, and keep trying new stuff! Also I am waiting for your video on unit testing for Arduino and ESP.

A great feature to have especially for the price you pay for the ESP-PROG. Andreas many thanks for this great video. It makes life so much easier to learn this way. Keep up the good work.

Inline debugging and preliminary ULP support for ESP32 in pio: like xmas and easter at the same time! Thanks platformio for making that possible and thanks Andreas for paving the way!

been waiting for this for a while - thanks for doing such a great video and making life easier for ALL makers

Wow, this is a game changer for sure. I hope I can get some time to try this out. I've been hesitating about working with the ESP32 (as I have a bunch of other Arduinos and compatibles already) but if I can get this working there's no excuse now. I would really love to see you come back to this from time to time with updates as you continue to work with this system and figure other things out, and perhaps as PIO addresses any issues you've run into.

You demystified JTAG debugging for me, so much so FedEx dropped off my Olimex ARM-USB-TINY-H yesterday. Following this video I was running and debugging in less than an hour. Great video as always!

Many thanks for this complete description!

Incredible level of debugging control! And it did not cost much at all. THANK YOU! Rekindled my interest in working with ESP32. Fabulous video! :)

Great subject and the ESP Debugger is already on order😁 sweet✅ Thank you Andreas on this very important subject. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 I hope to see another video delving deeper and it’s applications 😁🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Super video. Thank you so much. You really helped me get up to speed with ESP32. I just bought the ESP PROG and it works really nicely. 👍👍👍

I was able to do inline debugging for ESP32 about 1 year ago but only using Espressif WROVER kit and ESP-IDF framework. But your Arduino framework is SO much easier.

Thanks for the video - I ordered one and can't wait to start using the debugger. Nice work ;)

Dear Andreas, thanks for another very nice video on a Sunday morning. Another alternative for a JTAG adapter is named „Mini USB Blaster“ (a white and blue enclosure) for around 2-3€ on AliExpress. I‘ve used it for quite some time together with Eclipse, but it should work with PIO as well.

Hi Andreas, great video! Good to see this in action. Thank you for your time and effort!

Great video. Thanks. Another purchase is on it's way. One thing to watch is that the more highly integrated esp32 boards often use the jtag pins for their other functions, so it may be necessary to debug libraries on another board before including in final target. I use Ttgo T4 for some quick project as it has a lot of functions but has assigned all jtag pinsvto other functions. Perhaps future designs will leave jtag free if it becomes more popular.

Wow, wow, wow it's quite incredible how how you can keep coming up with so useful and instructive videos. I was wondering what you have for breakfast because I could do with some of that brilliance.

YES! Andreas, You're absolutely right : this will be a true life changer for me as well. I'm used to work with debuggers in the programming languages I use on a dayly basis and and always found it more than tedious to do my arduino programming without. Especially as I am not as safe and sound in C++ as I am inmy other languages. -When it comes to referencing and dereferencing of pointers I sometimes have to enter the area of guesswork or trial and error. - Optimizing code by testing different variants and approaches is very time consuming.When it comes to debuging. - Debugging data types via the serial monitor is not always working as expected, as it does its own conversions or requires manual conversion prior display, which sometimes covers up the problem. - Stupid errors like expecting a float value froma division of two integers without conversion - .... I actually knew about the inline debugging capabilites of platformio, but at the time I read about it, it was available in the commerical version only and was no option for the projects I did at that time. So I did not pay attention, when You made this video back then. Just when I accidentally heard about the esp-prog a few days ago, I looked into it again and remembered that You had done a video on that subject. Now I find it hard to wait until I get the debugger. I've not directly found a source that delivers from within Germany. So it seems, I'll have to get it from China and be patient. Despite the fact, that on an esp8266 only a few usable pins remain,I still think,it will be a huge support even for these boards. Especially,when it is about conceptual / structural debugging. Excelent, as always! Thanks and regards Frank

Interesting... got love all the Arduino developments...

Great video. Inline debugging is the biggest thing I miss, with arduino and esp chips. Spending hrs trying to find a simple bug which would have taken minutes with a debugger. Why I liked using pic's. Watch out ESP32 here I come, well I will be after the Ali Express 1 month wait.

Good job. You are on top of this stuff!

I'd subscribe to your channel twice if I could! Your content is very interesting, entertaining and useful to me. You are an awesome and inspiring man Andreas. Love and hugs from Chile to the guy with the Swiss accent :)

This is over my head. I was studying electronic assembly 38 years ago.

Great video Andreas! ... This remember's me to my first job (long long ago) where we created a (expensive) hardware for JTAG debugging support for the pentium processor. The main focus was to enable conditional breakpoints (as you showed) very fast. You always have to stop the processor put in some serial bitstream into the pins to get the needed values out ... on a pentium this was ~1KBit ... For that we created a special ASIC (25 years ago!) to achieve this very fast. My job was the software ... I miss these days ;-)

Bravissimo!!! From the guy with the austrian accent...... I have still one incuircit emulater from Keil, but for the 8031. Regards and THANKS

Thanks for all the great video's Andreas!

Thanks a million! You just changed the way I deal with the ESP32 once and for all. I followed your tutorial and I can assure everybody that it works perfectly! Do not forget to replace the drivers using the Zadig driver installer. I did and it did not work. I had to go and watch the video a second time and it worked once I replaced the drivers. Interestingly enough, the code always goes to the FreeRTOS when debugging at the source code level. It makes it even more obvious that FreeRTOS is an integral part of the ESP32 Arduino libraries. Debugging will lead you there no matter what. I simply stepped out of the FreeRTOS stuff because I was more interested in my code than any RTOS kernel stuff. On a different note: Who are the morons who disliked this video? Do they even know what they were looking at when they watched your video?

Nice! I know EXACTLY what you mean when you say, "...and I know what I'm talking about", (Lol, Good job explaining those traps for new players!) Thank you.

Another super video - thanks for making!

Thank you for the video. Makers owe you a lot!

Great ! I was waiting for this. You are too. Keep it good job Andreas.

Hey, I used an "Intel Blue Box" just like that one in my first job at age 17, writing PL/M code on our custom 8085 audio spectrum analyzer board. The debugger hardware was two large Intel circuit boards that would just get flaky after a while - we would pull the boards, rub the back with aluminum foil, stick them back in and keep working. Now we're both here 40 years later playing with ESP32 hardware debuggers!

LOL - I was building systems back in 70s to 90s - I remember using those Intel MDS-80 development stations with the 8 inch floppies. Recently been looking to get back in for some hobby projects. Funny part is in the videos I saw there seemed to be no In-line debugger or emulator; I was very Puzzled,... CERTAINLY NO ONE WOULD BE DEVELOPING CODE WITHOUT ONE!! LOL - Thankyou for the video - definitely adding this to the list !!!!

Essential information. Many thanks!

i was gonna say a JTAG adapter is too expensive just for a bit of debugging...but that ESP-Prog is just the right price!..Thanks Andreas :) nice to hear Neil Armstrong quoted correctly too!..

Thank You for the work! I have got also the Email, and had no time to test. Now you have done the work, which helps very much!

Thank's Andreas, Once again you make my day! (not for my wallet) You've got great content! Time to order one and the data analyser too :)

Greetings from your favourite fan in Zimbabwe

I just started to use PlatformIO with VScode (Arduino Platform). A bit of a learning curve, but I love it. On to my comment about debugging. I already had a J-Link, so I hooked it up to an ESP32_Devkitc_V4 that I just bought. I had to use Zadig to install the WinUSB driver, just as you did for the FTDI debugger. Then I set "debug_tool = jlink". PlatformIO recognized the J-Link, but when running the debugger, I got an error, and the debugger stopped. A Google search told me that I needed to hook up pin 1 (VT) on the J-Link to 3.3 V on the ESP32. Now it works well. Thanks for the excellent (as always) video.

Bravo, as usual!

Great video :) It would be awesome, if you did a video on using the second serial port on the esp-prog. For the newbee like me, it would be worth mentioning (in addition) to just connect one usb cable to programmer (es-prog in my case) and that the programming happens thru the jtag. I learn that the hard way.

This is fabulous. It makes the esp32 a “professional” processor, at a ridiculous price. What a find. Thank you Andreas. I was a bit confused by your use of “step over” though. I have always thought that meant skip the next line of code, and step into was to execute the next line of code. Is this debugger unable to skip a line of code? I am quite impressed with your entire library of videos available and grateful to you for them.

Great work Andreas!

Impressive totorial as ever Thanks for sharing :-)

This is a game-changer!

Hey Andres, the Arduino Micro runs on the Atmega32u4 chip which has a built in JTAG Debugger. The JTAG pin out can be found in the 32u4 data sheet.

Great video. Thank you Andreas

IIRC the Atmega32 has JTAG too, which messes with some pins in factory-new controllers. I remember having to disable it via the fuse-bits before programming. It is an old chip, probably as old as the Atmega8.

For your information you could of declared "localVariable" as static like :- static int localVariable = 0; With the static keyword the variable will not be destroyed when out of scope (exiting the loop routine) It will retain its value the next time loop is called unlike your dynamic variable that gets created each time you call loop. The "= 0" (assignment of zero) only gets called once during creation. The reason why this may be a better choice is because no other routine can see or more importantly change the contents of "localVariable" Which may be a better choice that making "localVariable" accessible to everyone (all routines) in some cases. Depends whether you want other routines to see the variable. Welcome to the world of debugging. 😃

Klasse und Grüezi in die Schweiz!

Excellent video. Glad I found it. Even if I was late to the party.

Thank you 👊🏽

This sure would have helped last summer with debugging the tank communications problems. That brings up another situation where serial debugging does not work well Debugging a crash. The serial writes are cached; so, the messages go out after a delay - and sometimes not at all when a crash occurs. This can mislead you regarding where the code is crashing.

wow! very useful video, again! thanks!

Thank you Andreas. A real breakthrough in ESP32 programming. Debugging was the thing we were waiting for.

1:58 - Also, using the serial port to debug doesn't work at all if the serial port is used by the sketch for something else.

Greutzi Andreas, thank you for this video, most helpful. I liked and subscribed. I'm glad you were excited by your first debugger - as excited as the Moon landing! One small nit about your video, Astronaut Neil Armstrong was so excited he forgot to say "a man" and instead said "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." :-) I just received my ESP-prog board. Can't wait for the missing 'a' in learning how to use it! -Frank

Hi Andras, had some problems with ESP-Prog at the beginning. Now it works fine, upload and debug. Only the serial monitor is not working, because on missing / unknown device. as not able to solve that.. But i can debug, it's better than serial outputs. Thanks a lot for your video. Peter

Andreas, first thaks for everything! I got a Segger J-link, it's what i could get here in Brazil in a fast pace, and it helped me a lot. I got it working better in Linux than Windows. on Windows sometimes the debugger didn`t work at all. openOCD couldn`t find it. So i`m working on Ubuntu and it runs fine, and by the way, compilation seems faster =)

I use esp prog debbuger with my esp32 Devkit V1 since 2 years. It works very well so thank you Andreas for your help. But with my new esp32-s3 Devkit it does not work... Andreas, which debugger you use for the esp32-s3? Best regards

Great video as always. Do you power both the ESP32 & ESP Prog with a USB cable? Do you also connect the VCC / Ground from the JTAG connection?

Very valuable info. Now to order the Expresive JTAG board. But because of the CoronoVirus restictions (03.31.20), it may be summer time before I can play with these new toys! AARG..... Thanks Andreas for this great info and explanation. You do great work........

Although I'm familiar with inline debugging from other platforms, it's rather complicated to use for ESP32 until the board manufacturers will use a standardised connector. My standard way of debugging, 99% ESP8266, is to use MQTT. In this way I can both "print" messages and also input data if I want to. I can do similar things as conditional breakpoints or logging, or conditional input controlled by MQTT. My first upload with a new project is always a simple standard sketch that replaces serial load with OTA over Wifi and has some standard topics for debug and reporting when a devices boots or restarts. In this way it is really fast to make changes to the code for debugging purposes. I never use the serial terminal since I'm used to making continuous improvements to my sketches with the devices long away from my computer. OTA and MQTT makes it possible to make changes and corrections without having the device connected physically. "JTAG" over Wifi supported by the chipset itself would however be very useful, with even having to use a JTAG physical connector...

Today I got my esp-prog board to work on my mac with help of this video (which inspired me to buy the esp-prog in the first place). I now am able to both program (upload), monitor and debug the ESP32 (I tried the SBC-NODEMCU-ESP32 from JOY-IT) over a single USB connection. I did run into some small problems. My advice is to install the official FTDI VCP driver for the MAC OS you are running (I'm at a beta of 10.15.5 currently). Then LEAVE THE PORT SETTING FOR THE DEBUG PORT EMPTY, but use the 'xxx01' port for the upload and the monitor port. Still I don't like the VS Code environtment that much. Maybe after some time I will learn to appreciate it. But even if I don't like it for programming, I still can use it to debug the ESP32 projects now. Next on my list is to create a jig to easily cable up the NodeMCU to the ESP-prog. I'm thinking about designing a PCB with feed-through header pins or so.

Thanks Andreas, that was very interesting and informative. I'm very interested in the possibility of using JTAG to test circuits. Is this something you could do a video on or do you have any recommendations about where to start?

Hi Andreas, thanks for your videos, they are really helpfull. And now we are confined we also have more time to play. One question: Did you check it also for the ESP-IDF platform & PlatformIo? I´ll give a try. Thanks again!

AVRs have something called "Debug Wire". I have used it with Atmel Studio about 10 years ago.

Super 👍

Instead of the Espressif or Olimex adapter, I've successfully used FT232H boards (CJMCU FT232H). They are about USD 7.00 on Aliexpress. The pin mapping is: TDI -> AD1; TDO -> AD2; TCK -> AD0; TMS -> AD3. I've used a Mac with OpenOCD however and don't know if it works with Zadig.

thank you!

Great and very useful video! Thank you. A tiny comment: I would not call it old technology, it exists since long, but old makes it sound like it's obsolete or legacy (and then it is "old" no matter its age). But otherwise, I would call it old when it's maybe 100 years or so ago. I know, in IT everything is old that is from last year, but I find the use of the word a bit inflationary haha ;)

Hello Andreas! THanks for your videos! I learned a lot. Especially on RF systems. Can we use any JTAG to USB converter available on aliexpress? Maybe the cheap one?

Great video!

Maybe a silly question, but why move localVariable to make it global? You can keep it local but just define it as "static int localVariable;". This preserves it as a local variable bit prevents the redeclation and this prevents it being reset.

Wow, really thanks.

Andreas, mach bitte weiter so, deine Videos sind einfach nur lehrreich, super und einfach erklärt. Denkst, man kann auch den J-Link EDU Mini als Debugger mit PlatformIO verwenden? Viele Grüße von nem Deutschen aus Mexiko :)

If you have the JTAG adapter connected, you can upload the program via the debugger, at 20 MBit/s. Just add “upload_protocol = esp-prog” to platform.ini. You can then disconnect the USB cable to the dev board and replace it with 3.3V supply from the adapter to the dev board.

Hi Andreas, based on your video I bought a ESP-Prog and was able to use it with an ESP32DEVKIT V1 right from the beginning. My current preferred board is he TTGO T-Beam but I was not able to figure out the right pint to connect to the ESP-Prog. You have also made some tests with the T-Beam. Were you able to connect it the ESP-Prog in the right fashion? For an advice how to connect the pins I would be very happy. ThX Tom

Oh wow that's interesting!

Very nice video, I must try to hold myself back from buying yet another debugging interface :-) I'm wondering during your debugging, what's feeding the watchdog? I wonder if the GDB debugging session reaches into the CPU and disables the watchdog timer when the CPU is halted? I wonder if the other CPU core is still running? So many question to pique my interest.. Thanks for the video; I suppose now in retrospect since you pointed it out, it seems obvious that the Expressif CPUs would have some debugging interface; just hadn't considered it. Glad that you did!