Is Segger Ozone licensed for use with Nordic devices similar to Segger Embedded Studio?

[owl-wy7n]

Does anyone know if Segger Ozone is licensed for commercial use if used with Nordic Semiconductor devices, similar to the use of Segger Embedded Studio?  Or, do we need to purchase a J-Link PLUS, etc., to get a license for Ozone?

[Amanda Hsieh]

Hi, 

I don't know how to use Segger Ozone with Nordic devices. If you want to develop projects with nRF52840DK, please see the Minimum requirements. You only need to download SEGGER J-Link Software, and the Embedded Studio license is free forever for Nordic devices. www.segger.com/.../

-Amanda H.

[owl-wy7n]

SEGGER Ozone works just fine with Nordic devices.  It's part of SEGGER J-Link Software.

My question is if the Nordic Semiconductor license with SEGGER includes all of J-Link Software? Or, are certain pieces excluded, such as Ozone and J-Flash?

I'll give a bit more background to this question, if you are interested.  If not, you can stop reading here.

More info...

Our product is nearing mass production.

We use GCC command line tools for official builds and releases.  Command line tools facilitate continuous integration processes that automatically invoke regression tests, etc., as we fix and improve things.

For development/debug our engineers typically use Visual Studio Code, VisualGDB and/or KEIL (according to their preference).

We've pruned our bug-list down to mostly obscure, hard to find and troubleshoot issues.  These types of problems require advanced debugging features and solid stability from our debugging system.

I'll give a specific example...

Recently we were troubleshooting a problem where our device will crash after several hours of proper operation.  After a crash we wanted to break-in with a debugger and inspect the internals of the system to help diagnose what went wrong.

Alas, none of our usual tools were robust and reliable enough to keep running that long.  The tools would crash themselves before our device could reach the state of its crash.  (This is a separate problem from this post.  If I have time, I might create a separate thread to address this.  But not right now.  After all, we rely on these tools to help us diagnose and solve problems in our product.  We don't want to spend time debugging the debugger!)

To work around this unreliability, we attempted to use the 'attach to running program' feature of these tools.  Alas, this feature didn't seem to work properly in any of them.

This prompted me to search for another/better debugger.

I found Ozone.

I downloaded a copy and took it for a spin.

I opened the .elf file output from our GCC command-line build process.  Ozone instantly knew about all the source files and symbols.  I tried the use case described above and invoked the 'attach to running program' feature.  It instantly connected with no problems at all.  I was impressed that I was able to inspect memory and variables without needing to pause execution on the target.  Our system was running fine, blissfully unaware that I was there monitoring.  I was able to do this just seconds after downloading, installing and running for the first time.

More evaluation is needed to know how robust this tool really is, but this quick demo looks very promising.  (By the way, this demo was done using the J-Link chip in a Nordic Dev Kit.  It seems to work fine.)

That brings me back to my original question.  Does Nordic Semiconductor's license with SEGGER include authorization to use Ozone as part of J-Link software?  Or, is it excluded?

Thanks!

[Amanda Hsieh]

Hi Bruce, 

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

owl-wy7n said:

Does Nordic Semiconductor's license with SEGGER include authorization to use Ozone as part of J-Link software?

No, the license is only for SEGGER Embedded Studio IDE. Please see the statement on the page. https://www.segger.com/news/segger-embedded-studio-ide-now-free-for-nordic-sdk-users/. From the Ozone webpage, it indicates that

Ozone can be used with J-Link PLUS, ULTRA+, PRO, and J-Trace. With other J-Link models, Ozone can be used without restriction for evaluation purposes or after purchasing the J-Link RDI license, which includes the Ozone license. 

-Amanda H