Hardware debugging: It just works!

Official Hardware Nano Family Nano 33 IoT
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I never expected that the hardware debugging for in my case an Arduino Nano 33 IoT was so easy.

I bought a genuine 20 euro J-Link mini and made a board with some Pogo Pins I had lying around so I'm able to experiment and debug without soldering:

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I only had to cut the very tiny cable provide with the J-Link and soldered it to a normal header connector.

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Then I needed to download and install the J-link drivers.

Finally, for PlatformIO I had to add one line of code:

debug_tool = jlink

Because I wanted to use the J-link to upload sketches as well, a second line of code is needed. Uploading is so fast now! amazing.

And then, to my astonishment is just did work! (as the J-link package already mentioned...)

So no reason whatsoever NOT to use a debugger... :slight_smile:

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I have a reason. It can make a habit of "ready, aim, fire" into one of "ready, fire, aim".

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That is beautiful. Was the epoxy necessary to make the pogo pins rigid enough to reliably align with the test pads on the Nano 33 IoT?

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no not really... It just felt better to make them a bit more rigid. (I used hot glue for that)
It was not much work and as the Nano 33 IoT will be my go-to MC it will make it easier to test and work with.

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Agreed! But you are very privileged to understand programming and it's concepts way better than me. :wink:

I have a hard time to understand programming so this is a great help to SEE what is happening during program execution.

But I didn't let it discourage me, made some great projects although it took much work to get it working by trial and error. :slight_smile:

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Ah. This is your clock: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/edr1924/dcf77-analyzer-clock-v2-0-c25404
I've seen it a few times in recent searches since I have been looking around and toying with the idea of building another DCF77 receiver, but this time from basic components (i.e. not using one of the pre-fabricated receiver modules). Anyway, a very nice project.

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As a project, I like it.

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Thank you...! Unfortunately for some projects, a DCF receiver is not practical and the placement of an antenna is critical so I'm examining now the NTP/RTC combination.
Without tinkering NTP is not accurate within 1-2 seconds when received but that has been solved by taking into account the time fraction info.

experimenting DCF77 is a lot of fun! I did buy though a few high quality DCF antenna/receiver modules because I tried many cheaper ones and they were so much worse in performance...!

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Considering only accuracy, GPS PPS is the best "bang for the buck". It's also the most accurate, even a cheap module can get you to within a few microseconds.

The typical Arduino NTP implementation is actually SNTP, it just asks for the time, without using any network delay compensation. True NTP does and it can improve over the typical 100-200ms network latency.

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That true, GPS would be the best option but as I have wifi onboard why not use it... I have no room for a GPS receiver in the final setup.

I have corrected in the sketch for NTP delay and included the microsecond info returned by the NTP server so the seconds tick now within 50-100ms with my Radio controlled clock.

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