[Tinyos Core WG] debugging tutorial?

[David Gay]

On 6/18/07, Philip Levis <pal at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> On Jun 15, 2007, at 2:24 PM, John Regehr wrote:
>
> > Below is an extremely rough outline for a TinyOS debugging
> > tutorial.  I'm sure tons of stuff is left out.  However if this
> > clicks for people I can write a few sections and serve as editor
> > and coordinator for sections written by others. Feedback appreciated.
> >
>
> This looks like a great start. But I think you're starting from the
> bottom up. It might be useful to start from the top down. E.g., start
> with symptoms, then go on to causes, etc. Something like this:

A good idea, but the tutorial should also provide help for "it works,
but doesn't do what I want" kind of bug ;-) (those do need debugging
too :-)) The focus for those kinds of bugs is less likely to be on
type safety, hardware problems, stack overflow, etc.

>    symptoms of problems on motes
>      reboots -- how to figure out if this happened and why
>      wedged nodes
>      network not working at all
>      network unreliable
>      network performing poorly

unexpected results

>    causes of problems on motes
  this is really the causes of "weird" problems (except possibly the last item)
>      broken hw
>      power problems
>      stack overflow
>      other ram corruption
>      interrupts disabled too long
>      tasks too long
>      not using an interface properly
>    how to debug on the motes
>      leds
>      serial printf
>      jtag / gdb
>    how to avoid motes as long as possible
>      pointer to tossim docs
>      pointer to avrora docs
>    how to understand apps better
>      how to look at global linking graph w/nesdoc
>      how to look at app.c
>    testbeds
>      pointers to open testbeds

David