“A nice little thing, useful for getting serial on a Pi or whatever other debugging you may need to do with it. For that there may be cheaper options, but the this Debug Probe offers:
- good documentation, both online and the box has a nice reference of the cable pins
- various cables (male and female pin connectors, and the Pi debug connector - works on my Pi 5's UART header and the Pi 2's GPIO UART)
- open-source and easily updatable firmware
... and it's still about £15 including shipping, so pretty cheap.
Only caveat is that it uses micro-USB in this era of USB-C... but at least it includes a cable for that too.”
“Works perfectly. Easier to plug / unplug by taking it out of the case.
Used with a Pi Pico W. Was also able to get logging over the debug wire using Rust and defmt_rtt (didn't even need to use serial).”
“The debug probe lets me program my Pico any time, on demand, without having to mess about with the USB connector or the reset button/pin. This is invaluable in my context, the Pico is installed in the base of a piano and I can't be walking away from my PC, holding down the button, pulling out the USB cable and putting it in again, then walking back to start the program upload cycle. Buying the debug probe saved me so much time and faffing about.
It's also great because it releases the main USB port for other purposes, e.g. a permanently connected serial output - or in my use case, a MIDI port.
I haven't really tried the debugging facilities that it provides yet - the things above were enough to make it pay for itself!”
“These probes are really invaluable especially when dealing with boards like the Pico 2 Plus. This is the third probe I've bought as unfortunately they tend to fail after about a year of constant use.
For Pico not using the SH SWD connector I tend to use a RP2040Zero running DebugProbe firmware instead as a cheaper approach. But perhaps not for those coming new to the platform.
Video of how I use these:
https://youtu.be/5rYwKmTVt4M
https://youtu.be/qNbKqf8ZLKY”
“I went through the chore of making my own debug probe two years ago, but the R Pi debug probe is so neat and compact, and comes with an assortment of connectors for the debug port. I am looking forward to revisiting the R Pi environment and the step-by-step debug faclities.”
