I appreciate your advice, Siwastaja. However, I have written a fair bit of code for this project and it all runs 100% solidly. I am pretty impressed at how solid it is - once I get silly bugs out. So I am confident that once I have done my testing etc, it will be solid enough.
The issues are in the libraries from, I believe, ST, which even I can see are full of crap, but there is no choice, because practically nobody is going to write code from scratch for USB and ETH. And the result would not be any better, unless somebody has no life and spends a year or two on it. This, I think, is how life is for an embedded systems guy these days, if you want ETH and stuff like that. FYI, the only reason I got into this ARM stuff was because customers are asking for ETH, which is not practical with the old slow micros.
Back to the topic, why is J-link Edu 1/5 of the price of J-link Base, while the description claiming it is the same thing. Are there some software licenses involved, which the Edu does not have?
AIUI, the way this stuff works is
1) Cube IDE has its own debug features, and it uses SWD (or JTAG) in a simple generic mode to talk to a debugger, which is accessed via USB, via some generic drivers
2) The J-Link stuff, looking at its
406-page manual, has tons of software utilities, some GUI and some command-line, and these can be used
standalone if not running Cube IDE, but presumably not concurrently with it
Is this correct?
Is the J-Link SWO Viewer the same thing as the ST "SWV ITM data console" but presumably usable only
outside Cube IDE?
FWIW I have just been testing STLINK V3
(not ISOL) at 24MHz, with SWV ITM data console running, running over the fine pitch 10-way cable (not the 20-way one which seems reliable anyway een with the ISOL option) and with a breakpoint running (at maybe 100Hz) with an ignore count of 10000, and apart from occassional debug data corruption I can't make it go wrong. This is a €30 debugger... what would a J-Link Edu do in addition to this?
All this looks to me like
- the STLINK V3 debugger is flakey when the ISOL board is added
- the 10-way debug connector on STLINK V3 has some problem, which becomes bad enough with the ISOL board to make it almost useless
- there may be a problem with the ST drivers (one does get the occassional "can't find the SDB" problem)
- some debuggers may be faster (but will they be faster than 24MHz STLINK V3 ?) or more reliable
I can just buy the Edu for £60 and not spend time posting these questions, and if it is no good, chuck it in the bin