Hardware Debugging with the ESP32

When your programs fail it’s really useful to be able to look inside them and find out what they are doing. If you’re writing code for your desktop or laptop you can use a debugger to step through the code and see what is going on. But that’s not as easy when you’re using an embedded device. The program is not running on the machine that built it, and this means that you end up putting print statements in your code to find out what is going on.

If you’re using an ESP32 device you can always buy one of these. It connects to a device and allows you to do lots of lovely debugging. I’ve been playing with it and writing an article for Hackspace magazine all about embedded debugging. It’s a really nice piece of kit.