Release Notes

Release v0.16.4

  • On an ATmega328P XPlained Mini, I sometimes got errors when activating the physical interface: "AVR8_FAILURE_CLOCK_ERROR: Failure when increasing communication clock rate". If this error occurs, we now simply retry. This appears to work smoothly.

  • Captured "Cannot open HID" exception when trying to connect to a busy debug probe.

  • Instead of ignoring SLEEP instructions when single-stepping, we now do "sleep walking", i.e., use the hardware breakpoint to wait for a wake-up after the SLEEP instruction.

  • Integration tests now also work for non-Arduino MCUs.

Release v0.16.3

  • Refreshed svd and device files.
  • Svd files are now distributed as part of pyavrocd-util folder.

Release v0.16.2

  • The assets files names now also contain the PyAvrOCD version number.
  • For the ATmega128, the breakpoint mode is now hardware-only and cannot be changed.

Release v0.16.0

  • The tool files are now only distributed as assets in the GitHub release. This means for the Arduino board packages that the tools files needs to be sourced from a new place.

Release v0.15.0

This is considered a pre-release in order to give people a chance to play around with PyAvrOCD. The following things have changed since the last release of dw-gdbserver:

  • Support for JTAG debugging has been added.
  • A number of command-line options have been added, and one option has been removed:
    • --debug-clock for setting the JTAG clock frequency for debugging
    • --prog-clock for setting the JTAG clock frequency for programming
    • --manage in order to specify which fuses and lock bits should be managed by the GDB server
    • and all monitor settings can now be done at the command-line, e.g., --timers freeze.
    • In addition, you can set options in the file pyavrocd.options that will override the options on the command line.
    • Using the notation @file.ext, any arguments in the file file.ext will be spliced into the command line.
    • The option -g/--gede has been removed since the effect of this option can be achieved with the -s option.
  • A few monitor commands have been added or modified:
    • atexit: With this option, one can control whether the debugWIRE mode will be left when the debugging session is terminated.
    • erasebeforeload: With this option, one can control whether flash memory is completely erased before a file is loaded.
    • Some defaults have been adapted, e.g., readbeforewrite is only enabled for debugWIRE targets, because for other targets it is counter-productive.
  • The breakpoint management has been redesigned and can now deal with multiple hardware breakpoints (as offered by the JTAG targets).
  • Single-stepping has been reworked so that no hardware breakpoint is needed any longer.
  • The problematic ATmega48 and 88 are now recognized before an attempt is made to switch them into debugWIRE mode. This helps to avoid "bricking" chips.
  • The CI/CD has been enhanced so that we can now see a number of indicators in real-time.
  • Executables are now generated on the GitHub hosts, which makes my life much easier.
  • The documentation now uses mkdocs and the readthedocs theme, which looks much better and is more readable, I believe.