Supported IDEs

There are some IDEs that are explicitly supported by PyAvrOCD. In addition, with a bit of effort, it should be possible to make PyAvrOCD available in other IDEs as well.

IDEs supported by board or platform packages

There exist extensions and/or forks of Arduino packages and PlatformIO packages that integrate PyAvrOCD into the following four IDEs.

Arduino IDE 2

Arduino IDE 2 is probably the most straightforward option. In contrast to the deprecated Arduino IDE, debugging is supported by making use of an early version of the Visual Studio Code extension Cortex-Debug. The design principle behind Arduino IDE 2 is not to overwhelm beginners with a multitude of options and interaction elements. This comes at a cost, however. One is often constrained in what is possible. If one wants to be more flexible, then it is possible to employ Arduino-cli, the command-line interface to the Arduino processor, which exposes somewhat more functionality to the user.

PyAvrOCD has been integrated into Arduino IDE 2 by extending the platform.txt configuration files of Arduino hardware packages. In order to configure Cortex-Debug, a number of attributes of the form debug.cortex-debug.custom and a few other attributes had to be set in the platform.txt file.

Arduino Maker Workshop

Arduino Maker Workshop is a Visual Studio Code extension that provides a very convenient interface to the Arduino CLI. It feels very similar to the Arduino IDE2 but offers everything VSC has, e.g., AI support. One can add the Cortex-Debug extension, resulting in a very smooth IDE. Because the Cortex-Debug version from the VSCode marketplace is much more recent than the one employed in the Arduino IDE 2, debugging is much better. The UI is more streamlined, and assembly-level debugging is supported.

The integration is implemented the same way as with Arduino IDE 2, i.e., via platform.txt.

PlatformIO and Visual Studio Code

PlatformIO is a cross-platform, cross-architecture, multiple-framework tool for embedded system development. It can be installed as an extension to Visual Studio Code, providing you with a powerful IDE for embedded programming and debugging.

The debugging UI is not Cortex-Debug. Assembly code can be displayed, but assembly-level debugging is not possible. Further, the peripheral register display is somewhat buggy, sometimes not displaying the values of the inspected registers.

Integration of PyAvrOCD is implemented in a fork of the MCU-family-specific platform, which needs to be specified in the project configuration file platformio.ini.

PlatformIO and CLion

The IDE CLion¹ by JetBrains is compatible with PlatformIO as well. After the installation of PlatformIO inside CLion, everything works out of the box. In particular, the display of peripheral registers and assembly-level debugging work like a charm.

IDEs potentially compatible with PyAvrOCD

There exists a number of IDEs and/or frameworks that can (probably) be convinced to cooperate with PyAvrOCD. However, a bit of manual work is necessary.

Eclipse/CDT

One option for embedded software development is Eclipse/CDT. Unfortunately, there is no out-of-the-box support for AVR chips. However, I found a very detailed description of how to configure Eclipse: Programming AVRs with Eclipse. I have not tested it, though.

CLion

CLion should also work "standalone" with AVR chips by setting up an AVR-GCC toolchain. And, as described in this tutorial, one can configure how to invoke a GDB server.

Visual Studio Code

Tony Mitchell describes in this tutorial how to set up an AVR-GCC toolchain in VS Code. Alternatively, the VSC extension AVR Helper can help. Then, the only thing left to do is to create the right launch.json file manually so that Cortex-Debug can be configured and invoked. I tried that with the AVR Helper, and it worked flawlessly.