The Raspberry Pi Debug Probe is a USB serial adapter based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and designed to debug the Raspberry Pi Pico, third-party RP2040 boards, and pretty much any Arm board through SWD and/or UART interfaces.
The main advantage over a typical USB-to-serial adapter is the presence of a Serial Wire Debug (SWD) bridge used for bare metal code development and debugging through tools such as OpenOCD.
The Raspberry Pi Debug Probe specifications:
- MCU – Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller @ 133 MHz with 264KB SRAM
- Storage – 2MB SPI flash (W25Q16JVUXIQ)
- Debug interfaces
- 3.3V Serial Wire Debug (SWD) 3-pin JST connector conforming to the Raspberry Pi Debug Connector Specification and compatible with the CMSIS-DAP standard
- 3.3V serial (UART) 3-pin JST connector
- USB – Micro USB port to connect to the host
- Misc
- BOOTSEL button for flashing firmware to the debug board
- Unpopulated 3-pin header with GPIO0, GPIO1, GND
- Green (GPIO15/7) and yellow (GPIO16/8) LEDs
The Debug Probe does not come alone and is accompanied by a plastic enclosure, debug cables, and a micro USB cable. The new board does not actually bring anything to the table except for simplicity/ease-of-use since it’s also possible to use a Raspberry Pi Pico or other RP2040 board to act as a USB to SWD/UART bridge using PicoProbe firmware. You would save time with the Debug Prove since cabling is much easier, and no soldering is required. Raspberry Pi also wrote documentation showing how to use the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe with OpenOCD and the GNU debugger (GDB) on Linux or Raspberry Pi, Windows, and macOS.
The company also says the Debug Probe provides an alternative to other USB serial adapters for those not using SWD, but considering those can be purchased for $1 to $2, the value proposition for this specific use case may not be there…
The Raspberry Pi Debug Probe is available now for $12 plus taxes and shipping from your preferred distributor.
Via the Raspberry Pi Blog.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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