CrossRoads:
Having a Serial header to plug an FTDI Basic or equivalent (CP2102) makes that easy.
I cannot disagree with that... A 5-pin male or female header is small-cost item. But, thinking back to 30+ months of projects, I have never used serial debugging once a project left the bench. So, even a 5¢ part does not need to be sacrificed for no return value!
I come from a very methodical engineering environment where great expenditures are spent providing coders with "promotional" environments:
- Development
- Unit test
- System test
- Pre-production
- Production
The system test, pre-prod, and prod environments are identical in hardware and softwares stack but the physical RAM and #CPU may be different between Pre-prod and System test. Prod/pre-Prod are identical with pre-Prod serving as Prod during product upgrades... Hence, if necessary, the machine roles could be reversed by simply changing TCP-IP addresses.
Point is, there is a place for debugging in the software maturity model, but as one moves forward, the need should become nil. Even in s 3-level model, the final phase should not have debugging active, IMO..
Ray