Tracealyzer. You can’t stay in the wonderful world of debugging and profiling code without hearing the name. If you look at Percepio’s website, it is compared to the oscilloscopes of embedded code. Use it to peek deep inside your code and see what it does. Of course, the code receives an interrupt and checks a CRC before sending the data through SPI, but how does it do it? And how long does it take?
Using Tracealyzer to view applications running on Zephyr RTOS comes with a special challenge: unlike some other microcontroller-oriented real-time operating systems, Zephyr exposes its kernel services via a syscall layer. A syscall is essentially a way to programmatically communicate with the operating system kernel from user level code.
Tracealyzer version 4.8 has just been released, with major optimizations and improvements for Zephyr RTOS, and support for 64-bit target processors (FreeRTOS, Zephyr and SafeRTOS only). In addition, the ESP32 support is upgraded to use the latest TraceRecorder library, supporting all recent versions of ESP-IDF up to v5.2 dev. Snapshot tracing is now primarily supported by the implementation for streaming mode, using the RingBuffer stream port.
Tracealyzer version 4.8 will be released in the first week of June, with major optimizations and improvements for Zephyr RTOS, and support for 64-bit target processors (FreeRTOS, Zephyr and SafeRTOS only). In addition, the ESP32 support is upgraded to use the latest TraceRecorder library, supporting all recent versions of ESP-IDF up to v5.2 dev. Snapshot tracing is now primarily supported by the implementation for streaming mode, using the RingBuffer stream port.
Tracealyzer® version 4.7 in now available for download and evaluation. This is a big feature update with several new capabilities and major improvements.
When debugging an RTOS-based system, tracing can often give a better understanding of the real-time behavior of your system. Percepio Tracealyzer supports two main types of RTOS tracing, snapshot and streaming, both offering the same powerful visualization although streaming allows for collecting longer traces. The Percepio trace recorder offers several options to allow developers to adjust the tracing setup to fit their target system and their analysis needs.
The use of a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) is increasingly common in embedded software designs. An RTOS makes it easy to divide your code into smaller blocks, tasks, which execute seemingly in parallel and independent of each other, as described in the first article in the RTOS 101 series.
We just released Tracealyzer version 4.6.4. Users with a current support contract can upgrade from within the application, or by going to the update page and download the right binary for their platform.
With only a week to go before the start of the 2022 American Solar Challenge (ASC), here’s a good luck shout out to the University of Calgary Solar Car team! Their race car, the Schulich Elysia, not only looks stunning, it also packs a powerful solar battery that can store up to 18 kWh of energy, enough to drive the car over 300 km when there’s no sunlight. Percepio is immensely proud that our Tracealyzer tool has been involved in perfecting this battery technology.
