Installation of firmware and software environment

There are only a few steps necessary for installing the dw-link firmware on the hardware debugger. Setting up the software environment is also quite simple, if you either opt for CLI debugging with AVR-GDB or the Arduino IDE 2. For other options, I refer to PyAvrOCD.

Firmware installation

You need to install the dw-link firmware on an UNO. Connect the UNO to your computer and upload the firmware.

The simplest way is to download an uploader from the Release assets of the GitHub repo. This should fit your architecture, e.g., dw-uploader-windows-intel64 for Windows. Under Linux and macOS, open a terminal window, go to the download folder, and set the executable permission using chmod +x. Afterward, execute the program. Under Windows, it is enough to start the program after downloading by double-clicking on it.

Alternatively, you can download or clone the dw-link repository and then compile and upload the dw-link Arduino sketch. You can also use PlatformIO for that purpose, because the repo is already in the right format.

Setting up the debugging software

Finally, you need to install the debugging software on the host.

Installing AVR-GDB

If you want to perform debugging using a command-line interface, you only need to install avr-gdb, which is most probably already installed on your host anyway. On Linux, the package manager of your choice will solve the problem. Note that the corresponding package is named gdb-avr! On macOS, use Homebrew. After having installed Homebrew, type:

xcode-select --install
brew tap osx-cross/avr
brew install avr-gdb

Under Windows, you can download a version from Zak's avr-gcc-build repository.

Installing board packages for the Arduino IDE 2

Open the Preferences dialog of the Arduino IDE and paste the following three URLs into the list of Additional boards manager URLs:

https://downloads.pyavrocd.io/package_debug_enabled_index.json
https://MCUdude.github.io/MicroCore/package_MCUdude_MicroCore_index.json
https://MCUdude.github.io/MiniCore/package_MCUdude_MiniCore_index.json

The first package index will make the following board packages known to the IDE:

  • Atmel AVR Xplained-minis (Debug enabled), which is a new core only for the three Atmega328/168 Xplained mini boards. It is based on MiniCore (see below), but is heavily tailored towards these development boards. Since these boards have a hardware debugger on board, dw-link is not needed here.

  • ATTinyCore (Debug enabled), which is a fork of ATTinyCore-2.0.0 extended to allow for debugging.

The remaining two package indices make the MicroCore (ATtin13(a)) and MiniCore (ATmegaX8) known to the IDE. These cores are already debug-enabled.

Then, you need to start the Boards Manager, which you find under Tools-->Board. Install any of the above cores you want. Note that the packages include tools that might be incompatible with older OS versions. If you encounter problems when starting the debugging software, consult the troubleshooting section on startup problems.