Trouble starting GDB with ESP-WROVER-KIT

Advanced Solutions Debugging
1

Hi Community

Being new to this forum I’d like to briefly introduce myself. I am an electronics engineer by education and have been working in development before drifting more and more to management. Now I am retired, but still an engineer at heart. So I can finally realize all those little projects I had in my head but lacked the time to realize. :wink:

Some time ago I started to use the ESP32, first under the Arduino platform and Windows 10. I liked the huge choice of useful libraries, but found the IDE a little “simple”. Then I switched to Ubuntu and the ESP-IDF under eclipse. A great IDE, but I found espressif’s current development environment somewhat over-sophisticated. I.e. I didn’t quite get along with it - maybe I am just getting too old for that… :wink:

So when Andreas Spiess guided my attention to PlatformIO / VSC a few days ago I found all my dreams fulfilled: Arduino and ESP-IDF, an excellent IDE possibly even better than eclipse, running under Windows 10 and last but not least able to use GDB for inline-debugging.

So here I am: I want to start a GDB-session with my ESP-WROVER-KIT, of which the documentation says " Espressif ESP-WROVER-KIT has on-board debug probe and IS READY for debugging. You don’t need to use/buy external debug probe. " Compilation and uploading a little Arduino project was a breeze, but when I ran the command PlatformIO: Start Debugging , the debug console said this:

undefinedOpen On-Chip Debugger v0.10.0-esp32-20190708 (2019-07-08-11:04)
Licensed under GNU GPL v2
For bug reports, read
http://openocd.org/doc/doxygen/bugs.html
none separate
adapter speed: 15000 kHz
Info : Configured 2 cores
esp32 interrupt mask on
Info : Listening on port 6666 for tcl connections
Info : Listening on port 4444 for telnet connections
Error: libusb_open() failed with LIBUSB_ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED
Error: libusb_open() failed with LIBUSB_ERROR_NOT_FOUND
Error: no device found
Error: unable to open ftdi device with vid 0403, pid 6010, description '*', serial '*' at bus location '*'

After a minute or so this message-box pops up: “Failed to launch GDB: Error in sourced command file:
Remote communication error. Target disconnected.: No error. (from interpreter-exec console “source .pioinit”)”

Line 11 of .pioinit reads target extended-remote COM5 Indeed COM5 is the JTAG debugging port of the ESP-WROVER-KIT.

GDB-error

This is the content of my platformio.ini:

[env:esp-wrover-kit]
platform = espressif32
board = esp-wrover-kit
framework = arduino
upload_port = COM6
upload_speed = 921000`
upload_protocol = esptool
monitor_speed = 115200
debug_tool = ftdi
debug_port = COM5
debug_init_break = tbreak setup

What did I do wrong? Can anybody help me as a newcomer, please?

2

Seems like you’re encountering the common “traps for young players” which were already talked about in topics like:

Indeed it has a debug FTDI chip on board. Have you followed the steps commanded by Espressif for configuring the jumpers on the board for JTAG, too? Doesn’t work if the debugger chip isn’t connected to the JTAG signals of the ESP32 chip.

Already defined, so that’s redundant and can be removed.

Very likely related to the fact that you haven’t used used Zadig to change to the WinUSB/libusb drivers, see topics links

1 Like
3

Hi maxgerhardt
Your posting solved my problem beautifully - thank you very much!
Indeed I did not use Zadig to replace the driver for the JTAG-channel, because I thought that Windows “automagically” recognised both USB channels of the FT2232 chip. Your link to https://medium.com… explained that this is not enough for opengdb. So after the Zadig procedure inline-debugging now works beautifully. (Yes, I did think before to put the 4 JTAG-jumpers linkig the FTDI2232 with the ESP32.)
Again, many thanks for your helpful support. :+1:
Peter