How to Debug HardFaults on ARM Cortex-M MCUs

How to Debug HardFaults on ARM Cortex-M MCUs

Jun 16, 2021

About the recorded webinar:

No matter your use case or how sophisticated your hardware is, faults happen on embedded devices all the time for a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s something easy like a reproducible NULL pointer dereference you hit during development or maybe it’s something more subtle like memory corruption or divide by zero faults that only exhibits themselves in zero-g, high temperature, weak magnetic field, or noisy RF environments!

In this recorded webinar, Chris shared his most efficient and effective tips for debugging and resolving issues quickly on ARM Cortex-M MCUs. He presents some real-world examples that he's faced over the years that will help with any MCU your device is built on.

You'll learn:

  • How to recover the stack trace leading up to a fault
  • MCU registers to examine when root causing a fault
  • How to quickly pinpoint the source of memory - corruption bugs
  • How to leverage GDB to speed up root cause analysis
  • How to automate coredump collection, offloading, and processing

About the speaker:

Chris Coleman is CTO and Co-Founder of Memfault. Prior to founding Memfault, Chris was an embedded software engineer at Pebble and Fitbit where he led efforts across the firmware stack and developed a reputation for tracking down and fixing challenging firmware bugs. That coupled with his passion for using tooling to efficiently deliver high-quality hardware products drove him to start Memfault. Chris graduated with a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Brown University.

Presentation & demo: 0:00 - 38:25
Q&A from live audeince: 38:25 - 57:57