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Guest blog by Florent Goutailler, Associate Professor, Télécom Saint-Etienne, France Teaching real-time embedded systems has always involved a fundamental challenge: the most critical behaviors – task scheduling, timing, and concurrency – are largely invisible at runtime. When students begin working with a real-time operating system such as FreeRTOS, they are introduced to concepts like scheduling, task prioritization, semaphores, and inter-task communication.

Percepio TraceExporter for VS Code makes it easy to export Percepio TraceRecorder snapshots during your debug session and open them directly in Percepio Tracealyzer. This is applicable for embedded systems based on Zephyr, FreeRTOS, SafeRTOS, Cesium, ThreadX or PX5, or using TraceRecorder’s “Bare Metal” option. The extension is currently provided in a Beta version as a downloadable.vsix file.

We are delighted to release Percepio Tracealyzer version 4.11. The main news are: Users with an active subscription may download the new version from the update page. New users may sign up for free evaluation here.

Think of Percepio Detect as a security camera for your firmware—always monitoring, but only storing data when something unusual happens, such as crashes or performance anomalies. By providing rich debugging information when needed while keeping the overall data volume to a minimum, Detect enables continuous observability over unlimited time, even on resource-constrained devices such as 32-bit microcontrollers.

Debugging embedded software has never been easy, but today’s systems are more complex and interconnected than ever. Real-time operating systems (RTOS) and continuous integration pipelines can make development faster—but certain classes of bugs are hard to reproduce and diagnose. These elusive issues often appear only under rare conditions, such as timing-sensitive race conditions or field-only failures. This is where Continuous Observability, powered by Percepio Detect, changes the game.

Using IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm with an IAR I-jet probe? Did you know this provides an excellent data channel for Tracealyzer trace streaming? We have just updated Percepio Application Note PA-023 with a simpler setup for trace streaming over ITM/SWO, enabled by improvements in IAR’s ITM logging support. This makes it easier than ever to combine IAR’s powerful debugging with Tracealyzer’s RTOS-level insight. Read the updated guide here.

Ask any embedded developer about their worst debugging experience, and chances are you’ll hear stories of unreproducible bugs, late-night watchdog resets, or CI test failures with no trace. Traditional tools often leave us blind at the exact moment we need insight.

We’re happy to announce that our Trace Export Plugin for MPLAB X IDE has been updated to version 2.3.1 and now supports the latest versions of Microchip’s IDE, including MPLAB X v6.20 and v6.25. This plugin enables saving trace files from Percepio’s TraceRecorder library via the MPLAB X IDE debugger, making it easy to open the trace in Percepio Tracealyzer and related tools.

When using Percepio TraceRecorder, kernel objects like queues, semaphores and mutexes are named using their address by default. This can be a bit hard to follow for complex traces. However, it is quite easy to set more descriptive custom names for your RTOS kernel objects. This by calling the “SetName” functions (or macros) found in the TraceRecorder API, for example: The first argument is the pointer to the object (i.e. the object address).

About 15 years ago, I worked at a company building network security appliances (with ARM-based network processors) and was responsible for the development of custom Linux firmware. The product launch was successful; we shipped and managed a large fleet of devices in the field. After a few firmware releases, we received alerts from the device management system telling us that there were intermittent problems. Remoted into the appliances but could not reproduce the error.