We are makers in all walks of life, but when it comes to building things with Arduino, almost all of us share similar feelings after making the hardware connections, write a sketch and then…nothing works. To make things works easier and to avoid crushing them, we can use a set of tools featured enough to guide us on the right path.
How the Dr.Duino looks when is attached to the Arduino board
The Dr.Duino was designed to cover some frustrations occurred especially during development and debugging processes. It is built to provide a full test and debugging system for Arduino shields and is featured enough to provide feedback in any stage of the project. More than that, it provides a set of ports, switches and LED’s to help you debugging input problems.
Dr.Duino is not the first Arduino hardware debugger and doubtless will not be the last one. Several others hardware debugger such as DebugWIRE or AVR Dragon are useful but has limited resources.
The Arduino debugger works simple and can be used by anyone with few electronics skills. The board is equipped with the same number and has the same location of Arduino pins. In this way, it can be attached between Arduino and the shields. General speaking, the Arduino doctor is engineered to allows access to any Arduino feature. After the Dr.Duino is attached to the Arduino, a set of jumpers are used to make the connections or disconnections between the shield and Arduino microcontroller.
The debugging process is fully assisted by a visual or sound feedback using LED’s or a speaker.
Whether it’s an input problem or something wrong with analog input, the Dr.Duino is here to detect all these problems.
The idea of the Dr.Duino is a good one, but sincerely, I have to wait and see if this board can solve all the hardware problems of the Arduino projects.
The Dr.Duino has RS-232 support
A short video presentation of the Dr.Duino
Resources:
drduino
Dr.Duino – Arduino Debugging tool!