SparkFun Forums

[firmwareengineer]

So I was curious and wondering if you guys could provide some input. When you are testing your arduino projects and are using your own shields what is your biggest pet peve about it? For example no test points to hook on to or reset button is hidden under the previous board etc.

In general what are your frustrations when testing your Arduino project???

[TS-Liz]

Hidden or not brought up reset buttons are a big annoyance for me. When using multiple shields that all use the same pins for communication by default, changing them around can become a pain.

That's a personal annoyance, unrelated to SparkFun, by the way.

[firmwareengineer]

That's a big one for me too. I ve been looking for something for developers like us which addresses things like that. what do you think of this Arduino debugging platform?
http://www.drduino.com/

Is this something you think you would invest in for your projects?

[Mee_n_Mac]

Hmmm ... so is the above like a bus analyzer that, in this case, sits between an Arduino Uno and a shield and offers up some analysis of the "traffic" between the two ?

My pet peeve ... no easy "free" software emulator to check/run/verify code on. C'mon PICs have had this since sand was rocks.

[firmwareengineer]

YES! But also provides access to common elements like Ground points. If your like me you end up breaking a resistor and shoving into one of the ground pins and connecting your meter to that. I think I have more broken resistors then I do non broken ones lol. I think my favorite part of it is that it allows RS-232 traffic to be looped back on to itself for testing purposes.

Good point on free emulator. Stepping through code is really necessary!

[Ross Robotics]

Agree with Mac. An emulator that lets you setup a circuit for simulation and then adding on a code simulator that can step through code while stepping through the circuit. This program would be based on AVR chips but could grow into other areas. This is the software I would pay money for.

I don't use shields so I have no input on this. All my circuits are custom.