Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
jeffgeerling.com
Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#2I find it fascinating to see what the Foundation is turning its mind to now it has a seemingly high-volume, reliable supply of its house-design ARM chip.
I wonder if the future of Raspberry Pi products will be going even lower-end, rather than dealing with the complexities of making a competitive Pi n+1
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#3I find it fascinating to see what the Foundation is turning its mind to now it has a seemingly high-volume, reliable supply of its house-design ARM chip. I wonder if the future of Raspberry Pi products will be going even lower-end, rather than dealing with the complexities of making a competitive Pi n+1
The problem - as always - with all the clones is that their ecosystems are either immature or are complete crap. Most of the Rockchip knockoffs are technically superior at a better price point, and most importantly, available for purchase, but their websites are hacked-together Chinese clones with broken downloads, non-verifiable server OSes, and zero documentation.
RPi has a foothold primarily due to the community and software support. I'd love to see that get broken up, but building that took years, which is not what most fly-by-night places and clone shops are interested in doing. I say this as someone who largely depends on RPi 3 and 4 models for embedded work and would prefer to switch to something like oDroid (and we have to some degree), not necessarily as someone who is an RPi lover.
I hope that the foundation's supply is for real and the pricing gets down to normal market rates.
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#4I find it fascinating to see what the Foundation is turning its mind to now it has a seemingly high-volume, reliable supply of its house-design ARM chip. I wonder if the future of Raspberry Pi products will be going even lower-end, rather than dealing with the complexities of making a competitive Pi n+1
The problem - as always - with all the clones is that their ecosystems are either immature or are complete crap. Most of the Rockchip knockoffs are technically superior at a better price point, and most importantly, available for purchase, but their websites are hacked-together Chinese clones with broken downloads, non-verifiable server OSes, and zero documentation. RPi has a foothold primarily due to the community a…
At least with the rockchip-based designs you can get the TRMs for the SOC.
https://github.com/Hao-boyan/rk3588-TRM-and-Datasheet https://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Main_Page
For the raspberry Pi 4b, the publicly available documentation for the BCM2711 SoC is laughable, barely 160-odd pages long and missing key details (such as which timers are accessible from the ARM core, and which are accessible from the GPU).
P.S. if anyone knows where to find the full TRM for the broadcom BCM2711, I'd be really grateful if you got in touch or sent me the pdf.
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#5I find it fascinating to see what the Foundation is turning its mind to now it has a seemingly high-volume, reliable supply of its house-design ARM chip. I wonder if the future of Raspberry Pi products will be going even lower-end, rather than dealing with the complexities of making a competitive Pi n+1
The problem - as always - with all the clones is that their ecosystems are either immature or are complete crap. Most of the Rockchip knockoffs are technically superior at a better price point, and most importantly, available for purchase, but their websites are hacked-together Chinese clones with broken downloads, non-verifiable server OSes, and zero documentation. RPi has a foothold primarily due to the community a…
I smell an opportunity here. The first company to ship a chinesium Pi clone that's ServerReady is going to be a serious contender.
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#6I would rather buy original STLink than this debug probe from two simple reasons - SWO and Reset.
SWO: Does exactly what UART-TX would do and more. And the most important thing is that you are not sacrificing UART port for debugging.
Reset: Some targets are stubborn and you can't connect anytime, but you need to connect "under reset". Impossible with this probe.
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#7It'd be great if debug probes had some common specs we could compare one another against. Why is this only 3 pin JST but most SWD ports have more pins? Will we be able to debug most SWD devices? Are there speed differences that we should know about/does JTAG and SWD all run at a standard speed, or can it vary? What does a $500 Segger J-Link have that a Black Magic Probe or Pi Debug Probe doesn't? Will the Pi Debug Probe perhaps be able to do flash-programming? How many pins does that tend to require?
I feel like we should expect JTAG support (for ARM7/9/11 and I think some other misc devices, but I could well be making up that last part) for the Pi Debug Probe eventually? Maybe there's some hardware complexity of the bus that makes this hard, but since this is just a Pico, it feels like it should likely be flexible enough. (By contrast the SWD port it does have is for thew newer ARM Cortex chips.)
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem - as always - with all the clones is that their ecosystems are either immature or are complete crap. Most of the Rockchip knockoffs are technically superior at a better price point, and most importantly, available for purchase, but their websites are hacked-together Chinese clones with broken downloads, non-verifiable server OSes, and zero documentation. RPi has a foothold primarily due to the community a…
At least with the rockchip-based designs you can get the TRMs for the SOC. https://github.com/Hao-boyan/rk3588-TRM-and-Datasheet https://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Main_Page For the raspberry Pi 4b, the publicly available documentation for the BCM2711 SoC is laughable, barely 160-odd pages long and missing key details (such as which timers are accessible from the ARM core, and which are accessible from the GPU).…
good luck. not to mention not even full schematics of rpis.. being in broadcoms bed and not even being able to buy standalone chips. and making hobbists think its an open platform when its one of the furthest away from that, ugh.
the effort is better spent on nearly any other arm soc
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#9>The Debug Probe adds on SWD and has a separate port for that, so it competes also with SWD devices like this knock-off of the SEGGER J-Link BASE Debugger, which costs $500!
I think a better comparison would be something like CMSIS-DAP (which also gives you JTAG)
Re: Testing Raspberry Pi's New Debug Probe
#10The comparison with the Segger J-Link is not entirely fair if you use a fake J-Link instead of the real one. It is an expensive product but the value also sits in the included software and excellent support. In a professional setting it is definitely worth the money.