I like adruno but in needs 2 things to sell it

Well let me say I love the avr stamp idea I think the avr duno with the mega 8 could be sold with the larger chip that would be a interesting selling point.

Secondly being able to step through the code is important. The GCC has that option. Now since this chip is in the real world stepping through the code on the chip with hardware attached can help find bugs.

So their are 3 ideas I have how this could be implimented quickly and easly.
Make a JTAG debugger jack avalable for people to use the GCC compiler and in circuit emulator.

if someone has 2 avrduno can one be the emulator and monitor the others internal memory and breakpoints? This would also have to be added to the functionality of the High level language or people could use GCC.

running a real time os for example if they booted their computer with DSL linux with a real time feature on it and had it act like a in circuit emulator to allow the AVR to step through the code and watch vareables change.

email josh_eeg@yahoo.com when you reply

josh

I think that the ATmega8 doesn't support JTAG, unfortunately.

Nope...

Debugging can be tedious, especially if it's trial-and-error, moving a line of code around that dumps debug info.

I wonder if you could implement a useful debugger by having the arduino "pre-processor" insert (explicitly in the C code) a call to a debug function after each user source-code statement. Yeah, the code for a "debug mode" program would be much larger than a non-debug version, but how big IS the average arduino program? Is the typical basic stamp program less than a a couple hundred statements? (BS2 only has room for about 500 statements.) Or how about an arudio simulator? (although gdb is not very beginner-friendly, it does have a standardized remote communications protocol.)