Using two instances of PlatformIO and two STLinks causes problems

Development Platforms
1

Here is my scenario. I have two target boards connected via two STLink interfaces. I finally got them to coexist (Thanks to manuelbl’s suggestion for serial number identification!). However, now there is a new problem when I try to get both targets running for debugging.
It appears that when one STLink is active in a debug session, then the second STLink will fail when trying to debug or upload to it. From what I can tell from the error messages it looks like GDB cannot manage more than one connection. The first STLink is using Localhost:3333 as port, and I guess the second STLink tries to do the same, so there is a collision resulting in this error message:

Info : rejected ‘gdb’ connection, no more connections allowed

Is there any way to get around this problem and have two debug sessions in two seperate instances of PlatformIO?

2

Ah, this is tricky. In that case you must use a combination of debug_server and debug_port commands, where you

  1. Tell OpenOCD to use a certain port numbers for opening the GDB server (all others can be random or unused). See docs. I think something like -c "gdb_port 3334" -c "tcl_port disabled" -c "telnet_port disabled" should work? Maybe with a set at the start too…
  2. Tell PlatformIO to use these new port numbers in the debug_port, e.g. localhost:3334
3

Thanks Max, that is exactly what I tried this morning and it works well.
I added

  debug_tool = custom         
  debug_port = localhost:3334      
  debug_server = $PLATFORMIO_CORE_DIR/packages/tool-openocd/bin/openocd
      -c 
      gdb_port 3334

and

 debug_tool = custom         
 debug_port = localhost:3335      
 debug_server = $PLATFORMIO_CORE_DIR/packages/tool-openocd/bin/openocd
     -c 
     gdb_port 3335

one to each project’s platformio.ini and it runs perfectly, I can simultaneously debug both projects each on it’s own STLink device. Still using the serial number method to keep them identified for now.
:grinning:

4

This is will come quite handy. Thanks.