In-Circuit Debugging of PIC microcontrollers
An In-Circuit Debugger (ICD) is a very powerful and effective tool for real-time debugging of a microcontroller-based system at hardware level. It allows you to run, halt and single step the program while the target microcontroller is embedded in the actual circuit. Once halted, the program variables, Special Function Registers (SFRs), RAM and EEPROM locations can be examined and modified in real-time, thus assists the designer in debugging the firmware and hardware together. In this article, I am going to describe the In-Circuit Debugging technique in PIC microcontrollers, and demonstrate the debugging procedure with a test project using the PIC16F887 microcontroller. Although the operation of most ICDs are similar, here I will be using mikroElektronika’s PICFlash with mikroICD device in conjunction with the mikroC Pro for PIC compiler for illustrative purpose.
Use of ICD in debugging PIC programming