Analyzing State Machines, Part 2
In this post, we visualise the custom interval and state machine information available in Tracealyzer and explore how we can use it to better understand our application.
Tracing adaptive applications for IoT end devices
Tiny sensor devices are key elements in IoT systems, and they need to be as energy efficient as possible. Roberto Rodriguez-Zurrunero has successfully used Tracealyzer in his research to both minimise energy consumption and fine-tune timing.
Trace streaming over TCP/IP on Xilinx Zynq
Xilinx development kit ZC702 features a Zynq 7000 programmable SoC, lots of RAM and on-board I/O connectors ranging from HDMI to Gigabit Ethernet and USB. We set out to build a Tracealyzer demo application for this board, based on FreeRTOS and lwIP, with live trace streaming over Ethernet. During this work we discovered an interesting issue [...]
Analyzing State Machines
In the previous Hands On post we introduced the concept of intervals, which is the time between any two events and can be added to the timeline. In this post, we will take the interval one step further and see how we can use Tracealyzer to monitor state machines.
Embedded Online Fall Conference, 28 November
Embedded Online Fall Conference is a free online conference where industry experts talk about current issues in embedded development and present practical use cases. The day consists of five presentations, some of which are broadcast twice, and you register for each presentation separately; see links below. Percepio FAE Niclas Lindblom gives one of the presentations, [...]
Introducing the World’s First Trace Profiler for OpenVX and Embedded Vision/AI Processors
Computer vision has become a core feature for all sorts of embedded systems. Therefore we have developed Tracealyzer for OpenVX, the world's first trace profiler for OpenVX and Embedded Vision/AI processors, in collaboration with Synopsys.
Percepio announces Tracealyzer Support for Synopsys’ ARC EV6x Embedded Vision Processors
Västerås, Sweden, 26th October 2018 * * * Percepio, the leader in software trace visualization for embedded systems and IoT, announces a collaboration with Synopsys, providing interoperability between Percepio’s Tracealyzer and Synopsys’ DesignWare® ARC® Metaware EV Development Toolkit.
Understanding your Application with User Events
What if you want to visualize some application data in Tracealyzer, measure the time between two events or monitor a state machine? In this post, we will show how you can set up this kind of custom logging.
Learn Debugging and Armv8-M TrustZone
Embedded evangelist and consultant Jacob Beningo offers two "Technology Primer" online courses during 2019, and both will feature Tracealyzer. Debugging Techniques takes off with "Developing a personal debugging process" in January and proceeds to cover subjects like printf(), ITM tracing, visualization and static code analysis.The other one, Armv8-M TrustZone Technology, introduces the TrustZone security architecture and [...]
Tracealyzer 4 for On Time RTOS-32 Tops Busy Week at Percepio
Percepio has just released Tracealyzer 4 for one more RTOS platform: On Time RTOS-32. We build upon the tracing library included in RTOS-32, which enables users to trace kernel operations such as scheduling, task communication and interrupts. If you use Tracealyzer with RTOS-32 today, contact your nearest distributor or drop a mail to sales@percepio.com to [...]
Tracealyzer 4 Now Supports On Time RTOS-32
Västerås, Sweden, 18th October 2018 * * * Percepio, the leader in software trace visualization for embedded systems and IoT, announces Tracealyzer 4 support for On Time RTOS-32, in addition to the already supported Amazon FreeRTOS, Keil RTX5, Micrium µC/OS-III and SafeRTOS/OpenRTOS.
Percepio Announces Tracealyzer Support for STLINK-V3 Debug Probes
Västerås, Sweden, 16th October 2018 * * * Percepio, the leader in software trace visualization for embedded systems and IoT, announces Tracealyzer support for the newly released STLINK-V3 debug probe from STMicroelectronics.
Percepio Partners with UltraSoC For Unified Hardware and Software Tracing
Västerås, Sweden, 16th October 2018 * * * Percepio, the leader in software trace visualization for embedded systems and IoT, announces an important step in its partnership with SoC analytics IP vendor UltraSoC. Together the two companies have integrated Percepio Tracealyzer with UltraDevelop 2, announced today.
Tuning Your Custom Trace Streaming for Maximum Throughput
The Tracealyzer recorder for FreeRTOS, SafeRTOS or Micrium µC/OS can be configured to stream the trace data via any interface you might have available. If you have designed your own custom stream port but are having problems getting a reliable transfer or sufficient throughput, there are several things you can try.
Tracealyzer 4.2.2 released with SafeRTOS support
Yesterday we released Tracealyzer 4.2.2 with support for SafeRTOS and OpenRTOS from Wittenstein High Integrity Systems (WHIS), meaning that we upgrade SAFERTOS+TRACE to Tracealyzer 4. Register on our download page to get the download link and a 30-day evaluation license. The SafeRTOS recorder library is not included, so please contact WHIS if you are interested in [...]
Zero To One Hundred
This fall, a team of dedicated students at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, sets out to construct a driverless electric car. It is the eighth iteration of the school’s Revolve project and the first one that Percepio sponsors.
Arm Tech Symposia, Taiwan 1–2 Nov
The Arm Tech Symposia is an annual event designed to share the latest Arm technology roadmap, the up-to-date diverse Arm based devices and applications. This November, the Symposia come to Taiwan for two events – 1 Nov in Taipei and 2 Nov in Hsinchu – and Percepio's local distributor Microtime will attend both events. If [...]
Identifying Memory Leaks Through Tracing
Have you ever seen your embedded system behave strangely and had that sinking feeling that you might have a memory leak? Tracealyzer offers several different methods to detect memory leaks.
Yes, it is actually rocket science
The cool thing about studying in Kiruna, Sweden's northernmost city, is that you may get to blast stuff into space on a rocket. The city is home to Esrange, a vast commercial and research rocket range, and the local technical university takes advantage of that with a menu of suitable courses, with names like "Spacecraft [...]
Verifying Task Timing and Scheduling
Quite a few embedded software developers don’t know whether their applications meet their timing requirements. In today's Tracealyzer Hands On post, we will explore how to use Tracealyzer to verify task timing and scheduling.
Arm TechCon 16–18 October
Percepio will not attend this year's Arm TechCon but it will still be quite the experience: three days packed with seminars and classes on topics like embedded software, chip design, security, and much more. The conference will be at the San Jose Convention Center, right in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Academics everywhere enjoy free Tracealyzer
India, Norway, France … there has been a flurry of interest around Percepio’s free academic Tracealyzer licenses lately. End of summer and beginning of the fall semester probably plays a role here, as does our announcement a few weeks ago. One of the free licenses was awarded to Anil Joseph, student at the Birla Institute [...]
WNIE in Birmingham 25-26 September
WNIE Live, or What's New In Electronics – Live, takes place in Birmingham, UK, on the 25 & 26 September. Percepio is present at the exhibition through our UK distributor Phaedrus Systems; you are welcome to drop by their booth if you are in the area. Phaedrus' Chris Hills will also give a talk on [...]
Running Tracealyzer 4 on Linux hosts
To run Tracealyzer 4 on Linux, the first thing you'll need is Tracealyzer version 4.2 or later. Next, you need to install Mono. For most distributions there's a package called "mono-complete", though some distributions and package systems may instead use simply "mono". There may be additional requirements, in particular for Debian/Ubuntu- and Fedora-based systems. See [...]
Tracealyzer 4.2 – New Trace View, Runs on Linux
Tracealyzer version 4.2 features a completely rewritten main trace view, and adds support for, among other things, Wittenstein SafeRTOS and tracing via ST-LINK debug probes. It also runs on Linux, so embedded developers using Linux hosts are now able to upgrade to the new generation of Tracealyzer.
Sept. 26 – Secure Bootloader Design
Secure bootloaders require specialized knowledge in disparate disciplines such as driver software, middleware, cryptography, security and cloud computing just to name a few subjects. On September 26, embedded consultant and evangelistJacob Beningo will host a free webinar where attendees will explore the major components and processes necessary to implement a secure bootloader. You can choose [...]
Tracealyzer 4.2 with Improved Trace View and Support for Linux, SafeRTOS
Västerås, Sweden, 6 September 2018 * * * Percepio, the leader in software trace visualization for embedded systems and IoT, announces Tracealyzer version 4.2. The new release features a completely rewritten main trace view, and brings official support for running on Linux.
Percepio supports education with free Tracealyzer licenses
Västerås, Sweden, 3rd September 2018 * * * Percepio, the leader in software trace visualization for embedded systems and IoT, announces the immediate availability of free Tracealyzer site licenses for higher engineering education.
Percepio supports the next generation of embedded engineers
Percepio has its roots in academia, Mälardalens Högskola in Västerås, Sweden, to be precise, and we have long supported both technical universities and their students with heavily discounted Tracealyzer licenses. Today we are taking this to the next level with the launch of a completely free site license for qualifying schools. "The embedded community has [...]
Synopsys ARC Processor Summit, Sept 11
This free one-day event consists of three parallel tracks in which Synopsys experts, ecosystem partners and the ARC user community will deliver technical presentations on a range of topics, including, artificial intelligence (AI), automotive safety, internet of things (IoT), embedded vision and much, much more. Percepio CEO Johan Kraft opens the Mobile/Storage track with his [...]
Tracing Amazon FreeRTOS and AWS IoT
When Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched their IoT platform Amazon FreeRTOS last November, Percepio was one of four launch partners presented on stage. This week AWS published an article about AWS IoT development using Amazon FreeRTOS, Percepio Tracealyzer and the NXP OM40007 IoT kit, written by Percepio CEO and founder Johan Kraft. "Tracing Amazon FreeRTOS [...]
Microchip MASTERs 2018
Percepio will not attend the Microchip MASTERs conference(s) this year (although we did last year) but Tracealyzer will still feature in some Microchip classes, we're told. And if that's not reason enough to go, there are lots of other reasons – the European conference alone features over 80 classes on topics ranging from firmware design [...]
Tracing exceptions in Keil RTX5
When debugging or profiling your firmware, it is often important to trace Interrupt Service Routines (ISRs) such as timer interrupts or interrupts from communication interfaces. However, using a classic ”printf” call is typically not an option since it may increase the execution time of the ISR by orders of magnitude. The integrated ”exception trace” support [...]
We are Moving
Tomorrow Friday is a special day here at Percepio HQ – we're moving offices. We are not moving very far, the new office is a ten-minute walk from our current one, but it is absolutely a step up for the company. We'll have our own offices with plenty of space to grow (and we are [...]
Tracing a drone flight
Percepio's Senior Drone Builder and Support Engineer Niclas Lindblom with his Embedded World drone. We knew we had to have something special. We knew we were going to show Tracealyzer 4 at Embedded World 2018, and we wanted the world to take notice – it was after all the largest improvement in at [...]
Tracealyzer v4.1 – Micrium and Arm ITM support
Percepio has released Tracealyzer version 4.1 with support for Micrium µC/OS-III. We have also added support for RTOS tracing via Arm's ITM interface (Instrumentation Trace Macrocell), that allows very fast streaming of software trace data with low overhead. “Tracealyzer 4 is such a massive improvement over previous versions and as we have been working closely [...]
Tracealyzer 4 Now Supports Micrium µC/OS-III and ARM ITM
Västerås, Sweden, 7th May 2018 * * * Percepio, the leader in software trace visualization for embedded systems and IoT, announces Tracealyzer version 4.1 with support for Micrium µC/OS-III, in addition to the already supported Amazon FreeRTOS and Keil RTX5. “Tracealyzer 4 is a massive improvement over previous versions and as we have been working [...]
GDPR: Protecting Your Personal Data
You may have heard about the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR, which is the new regulatory framework for managing personal data of European Union citizens; it comes into force on 25 May, 2018. Since Percepio is based in Sweden, which is a member of the European Union, and have a lot of [...]
Let Tracealyzer show you the big picture
When you open a trace in Tracealyzer, it usually opens to the vertical timeline. This view, which shows all activity in the system, is in many ways the core of Tracealyzer and most of the other views link back to the timeline, but with its massive amount of information it is not always the best [...]
Learn RTOS Programming in Four Days
Percepio's European training partner MicroConsult in Munich, Germany, offers an extensive 4-day course in RTOS architecture and programming. The course, aptly named "RTOS Mechanisms and their Application in Runtime Architectures for Embedded and Real-time Systems", covers a broad range of topics. General Introduction: Real-time Operating System Process/Thread/Task Management Interrupt Management Time Management Coordination Mechanisms: Synchronization [...]
Find the Tracealyzer license that suits you
This spring has seen the release of Tracealyzer 4, Percepio's most significant update to Tracealyzer so far, but that is not all. We have also simplified our licensing options and introduced some new ones, including an all-inclusive subscription license that allows you to use Tracealyzer with all of our supported operating systems. No matter what [...]
Taking on the Top Ten Bugs
"Top Ten" is a well-tested catch phrase that can be attached to restaurants in London, high buildings over the world and, well, just about anything. And rest assured there's also a list of the Top Ten Bugs in Firmware. Written by industry veteran Michael Barr, former editor-in-chief of Embedded Systems Programming magazine and author of [...]
Tracealyzer 4 is here
We have talked about it for six months, and worked on it for much longer than that, but today it is finally here - Tracealyzer 4! Starting today, you can download the new version of Percepio's powerful visualization tool and try it out for yourself. If you use Tracealyzer today, the first thing you will [...]
Percepio Announces Tracealyzer 4 With a New User Interface and Stunning Live Views
Västerås, Sweden, 20th February 2018 * * * Percepio announces a major update of Tracealyzer, its industry-leading tool for visual software tracing of RTOS-based embedded systems and IoT devices. Tracealyzer version 4 has been redesigned from the bottom up.
Using Tracealyzer with Cypress PSoC devices
In collaboration with Cypress Semiconductors, Percepio Tracealyzer® now supports Cypress PSoC® MCUs, including the hardware profiler unit in the new PSoC® 6 family. Percepio Application Note PA-019 describes in detail how to get started with Tracealyzer on Cypress PSoC® MCUs and Cypress PSoC Creator. The example is for PSoC 6, Cypress' most recent MCU family, but except for [...]
Percepio and Cypress Debuts Tracealyzer Support for Cypress PSoC 6 at Embedded World
Västerås, Sweden, 15th February 2018 * * * Percepio announces Tracealyzer support for Cypress’ most recent MCU family PSoC® 6, allowing embedded IoT developers to visualize RTOS software behavior together with hardware activity in the industry-leading trace visualization tool. This leverages Cypress’ innovative hardware profiler unit integrated in the PSoC® 6 MCU, which allows for monitoring [...]
Webinar: Designing and Debugging RTOS based IoT Applications
Embedded evangelist Jacob Beningo will present a free webinar on designing and debugging IoT applications. The webinar features topics like advanced RTOS application design techniques, event chaining and setting up an embedded connection to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Jacob will also use Percepio Tracealyzer to show how to trace an IoT application to not just understand how [...]
NeoMore hosts two free Tracealyzer webinars
Percepio's French distributor NeoMore will host two free webinars in February about RTOS tracing with Percepio Tracealyzer. Tuesday, 6 February 10.00 – Tracealyzer for Keil RTX5 (register) Thursday, 8 February 10.00 – Tracealyzer for FreeRTOS (register) Both webinars will be presented in the French language.
Happy Winter Holidays from Percepio
It's that time of year again – late December in Sweden means snow (mostly) and darkness (always), but it also means that the Christmas holiday is coming. Most of our staff will go on a well-deserved vacation break next week, so expect that it may take a little longer than usual for us to respond to [...]
Tracealyzer 4: Breaking new ground in RTOS visualization
A completely revamped user interface and a much improved live view are two of the most prominent features of the upcoming Tracealyzer 4, which we showed for the first time at Arm TechCon in October. We put together a series of short introduction videos where Tracealyzer 4 shows off its abilities. First out is the [...]
A Month of Good News
November was a good month for Percepio and Tracealyzer. We saw record sales, a lot of interest in the Tracealyzer 4 preview videos and everything culminated on the 29th with the release of Tracealyzer v3.3 supporting Amazon FreeRTOS, just released by Amazon Web Services along with several new IoT offerings. We believe Amazon Web Services has taken [...]
Tracealyzer v3.3 fully supports Amazon FreeRTOS
Amazon Web Services launched their own RTOS yesterday, as part of a major improvement of its IoT offerings. We're happy to announce that Tracealyzer version 3.3, which we released yesterday, fully supports Amazon FreeRTOS, the new IoT microcontroller operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS and Percepio have collaborated to provide Tracealyzer support for [...]
Tracealyzer 4: see more with Intervals and State Graphs
This is our third preview video of Tracealyzer 4, due out early next year, and this time we focus on two entirely new features: State Graphs and Intervals. Both features allow you to customize the visualization and analysis for your own system and the issue at hand. State Graphs can be created automatically from your trace, [...]
Tracealyzer 4 lets you see network activity
Welcome to a second glimpse of Tracealyzer 4, showing how network activity can be visualized together with the RTOS events. This way, developers of connected IoT systems can get a wider perspective of their system's real-time behavior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1O4AE4TEbE In this brief example we display events from a TCP/IP stack, but the same technique can be used [...]
Welcome to a first look at Tracealyzer 4
A completely revamped user interface and a much improved live view are two of the most prominent features of the upcoming Tracealyzer 4, which we showed for the first time at Arm TechCon last week. If you weren't there, you can still get a feel for the new product through a short video we have put together. [...]
RTOS Debugging: Everybody wants the fork
Deadlock is a well-known phenomenon even outside the embedded world. For a general description of deadlock, see this article; it is far better than anything I could ever hope to write. But I digress – back to deadlocks in RTOS-related programming. A clear indication that you may have a deadlock problem is when multiple tasks [...]
Praise for Tracealyzer 4
Percepio's stand at ArmTechCon. ArmTechCon 2017 is over and we have packed up and left. We spent two days talking to users and meeting partners, and we showed the upcoming Tracealyzer version 4 for the first time. We will have more to say about both Tracealyzer 4 and ArmTechCon in the coming weeks, but there's one little [...]
RTOS Debugging: When the important stuff has to wait
Priority inversion at work – the high-priority (red) task is blocked by lower priority tasks. The central idea underlying an RTOS with a fixed-priority scheduler is that a high-priority task should be scheduled ahead of one with lower priority. If necessary, the RTOS can even pre-empt the running task, forcing it to yield the CPU to [...]
Hands-on with Tracealyzer in Seoul
Our Korean distributor Dioiz is running a hands-on seminar on embedded development with, among other tools, Tracealyzer this week. It is sold out by now, but there will be a second event on November 22 and Dioiz has let us know that applications are welcome. More info here – note though that both the invitation and the [...]
RTOS debugging: Chasing the jitter bug
When you have a task in your system that is supposed to execute at regular intervals, say for instance that it needs to read a sensor value every 5 milliseconds, then you have a system that is sensitive to random delays – also known as “jitter”. When your task experiences jitter, it sometimes has to [...]
Percepio appoints first regional Sales Manager
Industry veteran Cliff Wood today joins Percepio as Sales Manager for USA and South America. – Cliff has been working with Percepio informally for some time and many of our U.S. customers may have met him, but today we are happy to welcome him as Percepio’s first regional Sales Manager, says Percepio CEO Johan Kraft. Cliff [...]
Meet Percepio at Arm TechCon 2017
The ”theme” of this year’s Arm TechCon conference is of course … Arm. Over 4000 embedded systems specialists are expected to descend upon Santa Clara, California, in two weeks to discuss all things Arm, from silicon design and software development to computer vision and the Internet of Things. Among these enthusiasts is of course a [...]
RTOS debugging: When the CPU has too much on its hands
In embedded systems using multitasking, you may run into a situation where some of your tasks run slowly or not at all. This is called task starvation (the affected tasks are starved of CPU time) and it can happen for a number of reasons; today we will look at one particular reason – a fixed [...]
Percepio announces Tracealyzer for FreeRTOS v3.2
Tracealyzer v3.2 adds powerful filtering functions to reduce the amount of data that must be sent to the monitoring host computer. This makes Tracealyzer applicable to a wider range of development setups. Today we are happy to present version 3.2 of Tracealyzer for FreeRTOS. The new version is available for download from percepio.com/download/ immediately. [...]
RTOS debugging: Dealing with timing issues
There is no doubt a learning curve when you begin using a real-time operating system (RTOS) in your development. You will work at a higher abstraction level, using more or less parallel tasks rather than just subroutines, and you will need to consider how your tasks shall share data and the processor time with each [...]
Tracealyzer Makers Edition is here
Photo: Sara Arnald, CC-BY Have you ever wanted to debug your hobby MCU project with a tracing tool, but felt that you couldn't afford a pro tool like Percepio Tracealyzer? Well, now you can! From now till the end of this year, you can purchase a non-commercial Tracealyzer Makers Edition license at the heavily discounted price [...]
Submit your trace – get a $25 gift card
A research group at Mälardalen University here in Västerås, Sweden, is investigating how RTOS trace tools like Percepio Tracealyzer can be extended for testing purposes and automatically detect bugs related to concurrency and timing. To validate their research, they need real-world bug examples. We at Percepio want to help them obtain RTOS traces, recorded with Tracealyzer, [...]
Embedded Conference Scandinavia
Embedded Conference Scandinavia 2017 will be in Stockholm, Sweden on 7–8 November. Please see our blog post for further details.
Sensors Midwest: An RTOS workshop with Jacob Beningo
Sensors Midwest takes place in Rosemont outside Chicago on October 3–4. See our blog post for details.
On the Horizon: two embedded conferences
Embedded Conference Scandinavia, ECS, takes place on 7–8 November, 2017 at Kistamässan in Stockholm, Sweden. Last year’s conference attracted just under 2,000 delegates so ECS now claims to be the largest embedded conference in Europe. The conference program is still in flux but the organizers have announced the first keynote speaker: Maarten Struys, Account [...]
ARC Summit: Common RTOS-related bugs – how to avoid and detect
Synopsys ARC Processor Summit is a free one-day event where you can pick from any of 25+ technical seminars on embedded development and electronic design. This year’s Summit takes place on September 26 and Percepio will be there discussing how to catch bugs in RTOS-based programming. Once again we are represented on the stage by [...]
Microchip Masters: Understanding and Meeting real-time constraints in MPLAB Harmony RTOS applications
Percepio’s Field Application Engineer Niclas Lindblom will talk about using Percepio Tracealyzer to debug common timing issues in RTOS applications at the Microchip MASTERs tech conference in the U.S. in August. Niclas shares a four-hour class with Darren Wenn, Global Group Leader for embedded development at Microchip, and they will focus on the combination of [...]
Microchip Masters: Understanding and Meeting real-time constraints in MPLAB Harmony RTOS applications (European edition)
Percepio’s Field Application Engineer Niclas Lindblom will talk about using Percepio Tracealyzer to debug common timing issues in RTOS applications at the Microchip MASTERs tech conference in Berlin in September. Niclas shares a four-hour class with Darren Wenn, Global Group Leader for embedded development at Microchip, and they will focus on the combination of Tracealyzer [...]
A Busy Summer Ahead
Summer is finally approaching here in Sweden. Last Friday we celebrated Midsummer, and the coming weeks will be a bit slower than usual as most Swedes check out from work and enjoy their summer vacation. But only a bit slower, mind you: the lights will stay on at Percepio HQ as we work on new [...]
The Running Snail car team is back for another season
You may have heard about "Running Snail", a team of German university students building an electric race car as a school project – we blogged about them last year. Now they're at it again, they will build a new car for the 2017/18 competitive season, and of course Percepio will continue to sponsor the team with licenses [...]