Device crashes when debug flags are turned on

[tyler]

I am writing firmware for a BLE Nano device using the Nordic SDK 8.1. I was having problems where my device would suddenly stop printing to UART and stop trying to bond with ble peripherals also. It seems like it is crashing so I went to turn debug mode on. I did this by including the ble_flash.c, ble_error_log.c, and ble_debug_assert_handler.c. I then added the cflag -DDEBUG and enabled debugging in compilation:

C_SOURCE_FILES +=
../../../../../../components/drivers_nrf/ble_flash/ble_flash.c
../../../../../../components/ble/ble_error_log/ble_error_log.c \

INC_PATHS += -I../../../../../../components/drivers_nrf/ble_flash INC_PATHS += -I../../../../../../components/ble/ble_error_log INC_PATHS += -I../../../../../../components/ble/ble_debug_assert_handler

CFLAGS += -Wall -Og CFLAGS += -DDEBUG

At this point I run my device and the behvior doesn't change (it still stops printing to serial and not making connections), but when I look in the serial monitor I don't see any errors or debug messages. How do I go about getting the error messages for my firmware crash?

[Sigurd]

Hi,

Did you try the approach we used last time in this post ?

[tyler]

@sigurd, yes I commented out __disable_irq() . I also tried commenting out ble_debug_assert_handler(). When commenting out ble_debug_assert_handler() didn't work I added it back into into the code since the comment says it should print a stack trace. What should I try next?

[Sigurd]

It could be that you are running into a hardfault. Are you using the Freescale MK20 to program the board ? Are you able to debug with that using gdb?

[tyler]

@sigurd Yes I am using the Freescale MK20 to program the board. How would I go about setting up GDB debugging with it?

[Sigurd]

There are many guides online. Here is one . But it's not sure MK20 support it.

Generally we recommend to buy a nRF5x-DK for development.