Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

RE: Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

tesc — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 09:48:45 GMT

Hi,

I am extremely sorry for the incident. The same happened to my inbox as well, where I got a large number of copies for a few notifications, but from what I can tell it was quickly discovered and resolved. I have provided feedback internally about your experience. Rest assured we consider this kind of behavior from DevZone unacceptable.

Please don't hesitate to let us know if anything like that happens again, or if the issue persisted. Worst case you can disable email notifications on your user settings page: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/user/settings

Regards,
Terje

RE: Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

Hugo Habicht — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 15:04:32 GMT

Is that some sick joke?

I got 4 1/2 pages of emails that the nordic forum has been updated.

I WOULD APPRECIATE IF YOU WOULD STOP THAT SPAMMING NOW.

RE: Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

Hugo Habicht — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 14:45:20 GMT

Hi Terje,

all work computers are not on the internet, so it looks as if we cannot use nRF Connect nor can we send an error report to Segger. So be it; nothing I can do about that. Software designers nowadays seem to assume internet connection is always present.

Wrt to the Segger software crashing: it seems to happen when deleting or adding projects. Once you don't do that it seems to be fairly well behaved; have not seen any crashes since.

I think we should file that under "unexplained software phenomenon" and close this thread.

Kind Regards,

p.s.: what's the matter with your web software? One email would be enough...

RE: Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

tesc — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 14:34:14 GMT

Hi,

nRF Connect for Desktop is a platform for several tools/applications, and those "apps" are fetched over the Internet, so yes, no Internet connection may lead to issues. It should run fine once installed, except for you not getting any new updates.

Regarding the SES issues I am sure Segger would welcome the automated error report with your added description, although I suspect that would need an Internet connection as well, for sending the report in.

Do you have a similar setup on a machine connected to the Internet, so that Internet connection (or rather lack thereof) can be ruled out as an error source, for both SES and nRF Connect for Desktop?

Regards,
Terje

RE: Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

Hugo Habicht — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 15:13:30 GMT

Hi Terje,

pressing Ctrl-R makes the window go white for a split second and then its back to the nice light blue colour:

Apart from minimising and maximising there is not much happening. Does it require internet connection? Computer runs offline. I'd say don't waste any time on this if it works fine for all the other users. I have an embedded BLE board here with some handknit software running on the computer which makes a fine client, so that will do.

Here the screen when segger studio refuses to work but as I said already nothing related to the underlying problem in it:

Kind Regards,

RE: Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

tesc — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 14:34:05 GMT

Hi,

nRF Connect for Desktop is actually developed by us, in-house, so I can have a talk with the developers. It is based on node.js, hence the built-in web browser, as is not unusual in today's day and age. If you get a blank window, sometimes reloading (ctrl + r) solves the issue.

Regards,
Terje

RE: Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

Hugo Habicht — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 13:58:24 GMT

Hi Terje,

thank you for your reply, so the problem must be with the Linux version.

I do not know what older versions are doing, I simply downloaded the latest from the Nordic Website. It is V4.52c. Maybe they let it crash because they did not detect a commercial license? When I click on "Activate your free license" for Nordic parts nothing happens.

I will have a look at the other j-link tools but I think I did not see a separate debugger there any more. As far as I remember segger offered that separately at some stage but it seems they put everything now into their studio software.

I saw the jlink gdb server executable; we may try this with an old open source stand alone debugger we have.

Their nRF Connect (which we would have liked to use) is not working either. Starting it gives a chrome-sandbox (chrome as in google chrome spyware?) error message, with --no-sandbox option I get the Nordic logo and then an empty window. Nothing else. In fairness they say it works with a particular Ubuntu version so you cannot really expect the stuff to work with any Linux system. Too many around at this stage; the curse of the open source community reinventing the wheel.

Kind Regards,

RE: Segger Studio crashing, looking for alternatives

tesc — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 13:22:12 GMT

Hi,

Thanks for reporting this. I have used SES for a couple of years (admitedly under Windows) and not seen issues like that. It does not sound normal. Does the same happen for other versions of SES as well, or is it specific to one version?

There is a J-Link programmer on board our DKs, for programming, debugging, etc. For programming you can use nrfjprog, a command line tool which is part of nRF Command Line Tools. For debugging you can use gdb (and from what I understand SES uses gdb under the hood as well.) The various J-Link tools from Segger can also be used for various purposes, most notably the RTT viewer.

Regards,
Terje