Tag Archives: black magic probe

New Black Magic Debug Maintainer

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Hi everyone!

As some of you might know Black Magic Debug was created and maintained for many years by Gareth McMullin. He has created a wonderful tool that we all use and love. You might have also noticed that Gareth did not have much time to dedicate to the project for the last few years. He asked me a while ago if I would be able to take over the project and become an official maintainer of Black Magic Debug. I did not have the necessary resources to dedicate to the project until very recently. But it is finally time, from now on I am officially taking on the position as the Black Magic Debug maintainer. 🙂

I want to thank Gareth for putting the faith in me and creating this amazing project. I also have to say big thanks to Uwe Bonnes who stepped in while Gareth and I were unavailable to keep the patches and Black Magic releases going.

I have a lot of plans for the Black Magic project, software/firmware and hardware wise. You might have noticed I already spent some time catching up on and cleaning the GitHub issues. It is by no means finished and probably never will be, but I hope we can keep open issues and pull requests on a better level going forward.

To resolve the issue that the native Black Magic Hardware is currently not available due to chip shortages, I am working on the new revision of the native hardware. This should make them available again and allow us for more alternative chip choices. We are adding some cool new features to the new hardware while we are at it. (more information soon) I am also working on a tool that will help users manage the Black Magic Probe firmware, opening doors to more flexibility and versatility of the project overall. (also, more information about that soon)

A small teaser of the new native Black Magic Probe hardware V2.3a
3D Printed cases for BMP V2.3a

You can also expect that we will finally get a proper CI system including HITL (Hardware In The Loop) testing. Something we are in dire need to keep the stability expectations as high as possible. I was collecting a lot of hardware over the years and I want to put it together to some good use. We will also improve the contribution process and document the APIs better, this should hopefully make addition of new targets easier.

There is one more thing that I would like to mention. In the process of changing maintainership the GitHub organization that the project is under will be changing it’s name. As it is not developed by Blacksphere (Gareth’s consulting company) we will be renaming the org to the project’s name itself. It will serve as an umbrella for additional repositories related to the Black Magic Debug project. Don’t worry GitHub should redirect the old organization names to the new one. I hope it will not cause too much disruption. We will also finally be officially retiring the SourceForge project page to avoid confusion. This means the old unused mailing lists will be disabled.

If you have questions or concerns and want to get in touch with the project you have multiple options: open an issue on github, join the 1BitSquared Discord server and talk to us in the #blackmagic channel. If it is something you would rather discuss one on one, you can also write an email to: contact at black-magic org where you will be able to reach the core developer team.

I am excited to work with you all to bring the Black Magic Debug project to the next level.

Stay safe, cheers,
Piotr Esden-Tempski

Black Magic

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A few months ago I met a great guy Gareth MacMullin in the libopencm3 channel. He was working on a new Open-Source and Open-Hardware JTAG solution called Black Magic Probe(BMP). I got one of those and instantly fell in love with it.

OpenOCD is great in a sense because it supports lots of targets and probes but that is its disadvantage too. It is very often difficult to set up and tends not to work properly in many cases. The approach of BMP is quite different. Instead of the probe being quite dumb and using OpenOCD to do the JTAG magic the BMP uses a microcontroller (STM32F1) and implements a GDB server inside the controller. This solution cuts out the middleman and talks JTAG as well as the new Serial Wire Debug (SWD) protocol itself. Requiring only a working GDB on the computer.

The BMP supports several Cortex-M3 targets and more devices are being added fairly quickly. The first time I tried it with an STM32 it just worked. No command line parameters just:

arm-none-eabi-gdb some_elf_file
target extended-remote /dev/ACM0
mon swdp_scan
att 1
load
run

It shocked me how fast the loading process was. Because it is not one of the FTDI chips and does not have to bitbang all of the JTAG protocol over USB it can run much much faster. I know there are commercial devices like JLink that have logic inside them but they cost arm and a leg if you don’t want to just get the educational version of it.

One more thing comes to mind when you realize that the BMP supports SWD. You only need three pins to be able to use it GND, SWDIO and SWCLK. That decreases the required real estate on the PCB significantly. I am not sure what the status of OpenOCD support for SWD is now but it is work in progress as far as I understand. On BMP it just works.

Since I started using the BMP there were several interesting developments that Gareth added. The BMP is not only offering one serial port for the GDB extended remote interface but also a second one providing a TTL level UART interface. The BMP also supports tracing by now using the TRACESWO pin. This provides a reasonably high speed tracing. Gareth also wrote a plotter for this feature that plots the contents of traced variables in your code.

Early versions of BMP were 2.5cm X 5cm the current version called Black Magic Probe Mini (BMPM) is smaller, the same size as the FLOSS-JTAG I made a while ago, it is mere 1.5cm X 3cm, packing in all the power of the BMP what makes it great for doing embedded stuff on the go, for example in the subway.

So to wrap things up, it is a high grade, Open-Source and Open-Hardware device. For $60 this thing is a steal!

Shameless plug: On 1 BIT SQUARED store you can order the Black Magic Probe.

There are also some other distributors listed on the BMP page too. So check it out! I bet you will love it. 🙂