FREE Advanced Debugger for Portenta H7 | Arduino Blog

We are happy to announce a new partnership with Lauterbach to provide all Portenta H7 customers  with the TRACE32 debugger for free.

Lauterbach’s TRACE32 debugger has been at the forefront of debug technology for more than four decades, and it is this wealth of experience and expertise that Lauterbach will draw on for the Arduino Portenta.

How to get your debugger

Each Portenta H7 comes with a unique serial number which can be displayed in the Arduino IDE or TRACE32. This serial number can be used to obtain a free license  via the Lauterbach registration page – once you’ve submitted your details you will receive an email with your license to unlock the full version of the TRACE32 debugger. 

For those users who need advanced capabilities, such as JTAG debugging and real-time trace a carrier module is available. This module makes the debug and trace pins available to the TRACE32 uTrace® for Cortex-M (MIPI20T), and the switch to TRACE32 uTrace® for Cortex-M is almost transparent to the user.

How to use the debugger with the Portenta H7

This tutorial explains how to use the Lauterbach TRACE32 GDB front-end debugger with your Portenta H7. The debugger communicates with the Portenta via GDB on a serial interface which means that all you need to start debugging is a USB cable to connect Portenta to TRACE32.

To enable the GDB interface on Portenta, simply include and compile Arduino’s ThreadDebug library as part of your sketch. Then flash your compiled sketch either via Arduino IDE or directly inside TRACE32. After flashing the sketch you can connect to it in TRACE32 and start inspecting, logging and tracing. Amongst other interesting data it is possible to inspect variables, registers, stack frames, raw memory contents or interrupts which allow you to track down any bug or other issue you may encounter when developing an application.

“This is a meeting of minds of two of the biggest forces in embedded computing and I am waiting with anticipation to see where the vibrant Arduino community takes this,” said Maurizio Menegotto, Managing Director of Lauterbach SRL. “We are honored to be working with Arduino on this exciting project and look forward to welcoming the next generation of embedded engineers to the Lauterbach community.”

“We are more than happy about the partnership between Arduino and Lauterbach, which will enable our customers to benefit from an advanced debugger tool, fundamental for each professional application,” added Andrea Richetta, Arduino Pro BU Leader.  

If you are a Portenta H7 user and want to get the TRACE32 debugger for free, please complete the registration form on the Lauterbach website.