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Thanks for confirming your support status.
The ESP32 devices come with their own highly specialized SDK (ESP-IDF). The SDK enforces splitting the project into multiple components referenced by one or more applications, and allows creating special unit test targets for the components. This layout is considerably different from the regular embedded projects, hence, instead of porting TinyEmbeddedTest to it, VisualGDB reuses the regular ESP-IDF testing functionality, extending it to report the test results directly via JTAG.
You can find a detailed tutorial explaining the ESP32 unit tests here: https://visualgdb.com/tutorials/esp32/tests/
Hi,
The main reason it is not done automatically is because the regular STM32 BSP is completely separate from the STM32CubeMX logic, with numerous edge cases.
E.g. it can have slightly different device names, there could be multiple versions of the BSP with different definition files, etc. So instead of trying to guess which file should be imported automatically, we simply made it easy and intuitive to locate the missing file manually via the link in the Hardware Registers window, so our users can choose the exact file they would want to use.
If ST decides to ship the SVD files with the STM32CubeMX SDKs/device definitions, we will definitely update VisualGDB to import them automatically, but for now we would advise simply picking the definition file manually on first run.
Hi,
Setting CMAKE_C_FLAGS_RELEASE from CMakeLists.txt should work just fine, as long as:
- It is done after the project() line
- It does not specify any extra attributes (e.g. CACHE)
If it doesn’t work, please share your CMakeLists.txt file and a sample gcc command line (you can force ninja to print the failed command line by adding an #error directive in the source file) and we will investigate it further.
Hi,
No problem, this can be easily configured via VS properties (not VisualGDB Project Properties) for the top-level project node in Solution Explorer (with the triangle icon).
You can simply set the Sorting/Grouping -> Groups Sources By Types to False, and the source/header files filters will disappear throughout the project.
The STM32CubeMX files item is a special case though – it internally counts as a BSP item (like the one with the chip icon), but is displayed underneath the main executable to improve usability.
You can try creating a virtual target folder via context menu of the top-level project node and moving it there. Currently, this triggers a bug where the folder will appear in both places, but if using target folders for the STM32CubeMX files folder works for you, we can easily fix it.
It generally depends on your project type. Normally, if you have VisualGDB and the toolchains/BSPs installed on the build server (same user account as used by Jenkins), you do not need to specify them manually.
You can find several tutorials showing how to use VisualGDB with CI/CD systems here: https://visualgdb.com/w/tutorials/tag/tfs/
Sorry for the confusion. The NRFConnect projects are not based on MSBuild. They use a completely different mechanism for loading and building, so the MSBuild executable will not recognize them. You can still build them by running devenv.exe /build if you prefer to use the same mechanism for all project types.
That said, if you have VisualGDB installed on that machine, it is easier to build the projects by running VisualGDB directly:
VisualGDB.exe /build <file.vgdbproj>
Thanks for confirming this. Please try the following build, it uses forward slashes for
DTC_OVERLAY_FILE: VisualGDB-5.6.104.4539.msiHi,
This happens because the build system does not have VisualGDB installed, so it cannot load the .vgdbproj files.
That said, NRFConnect projects are built directly by CMake with the NRFConnect build scripts. VisualGDB simply runs the build tools and interprets the results. Hence, you can build the project on your build server by manually running CMake and Ninja with the same command lines as used by VisualGDB (you may need to adjust some absolute paths).
Please refer to the following page for a detailed explanation how to CMake-based build projects outside VisualGDB: https://visualgdb.com/documentation/projects/cmake/#troubleshooting
The first option should work. You can switch the filter from gdb.exe to toolchain.xml in the bottom right corner of the “open file” dialog.
You can dump the command lines used by VisualGDB by right-clicking on the cyan lines in the configuration log (first line on your screenshot) as shown in our documentation. Please ensure you dump them and follow the troubleshooting instructions from our first reply. If you do not wish to do it, we can add this issue to the backlog, however we would need to wait for other users to confirm it before committing any resources to further investigation.
Thanks for renewing your support. The logic used by VisualGDB to automatically find installed toolchains indeed only counts the GCC/GDB versions, since the revision number (e.g. R2) for all regular toolchains refers to bugfix releases the fully supersede the older ones.
ESP32 toolchains are an exception from this – Espressif often releases minor toolchain patches that keep the same GCC/GDB version numbers, but change the functionality in subtle ways, affecting compatibility with different ESP-IDF versions.
That said, the workaround for this is very straight-forward: simply select “locate the toolchain manually” in the toolchain selector drop-down, and point VisualGDB to the corresponding toolchain.xml file. It will allow having multiple toolchains with the same version, only differing in the revision number.
Regarding the 8.4.0/8.1.0/r1 toolchain, due to the large size of the ESP32 toolchains, we usually remove the versions that get superseded by the newer releases (i.e. have the same ESP-IDF versions as the previous one, and only introduce bugfixes) and the versions older than a couple of years. You can find the full list of available toolchains here: https://gnutoolchains.com/esp32/. If you are planning to use a certain toolchain version for longer than a couple of years, we strongly advise making backups of the installer on your side.
Hi,
Debugging CMake files requires building our fork of CMake and will not work with the regular builds. Please refer to this page for more details.
