This mobility feature is especially important for debugging the sensor hardware and software, which "is very much a nightmare," says Srivastava, who has developed a sensor operating system at UCLA called SOS. "Bugs can really bring something down," he adds.
The debugging environment simulates the hardware and provides signal outputs which provide the necessary debugging info.
In addition, by separating the debug interface and debug control hardware, the actual interface type used on the chip can become transparent; hence the same debugging tasks can be carried out no matter what debugging interface you use.
It is suggested that after the program compilation is done, we can then update the debug option to select the required debug interface hardware, and then we download the program to the flash memory and test the application.
While writing code we would switch off times typing and doing the hardware debugging.
In contrast, the hardware debugging tools usually consist of a good oscilloscope, a digital meter, and the engineer's wits.
The emulator would be used by the hardware designer to help debug the board before allowing the software engineer access to the prototype hardware.
As shown in Figure 5, we developed the hardware prototype of M2M mote device and debugging board according to IEEE 802.15.4, which is considered a major technical candidate for capillary M2M networks.
Once they had developed the hardware emulation software, Connectix engineers also used the Sony BIOS to "debug" the emulation software.
The embedded processing power and rich FPGA resource make it possible to build a stand-alone sensing system; however, due to the hardware programming and embedded environment, it is also more difficult to design and debug.
The engineers observed the operation of the Sony BIOS through use of a debugging program that permitted the engineers to observe the signals sent between the BIOS and the hardware emulation software.
