The Spark Gap - Episode 17
Hosts Carl and Corey discuss the fragmented landscape of in-circuit programmers and debuggers for embedded systems, highlighting the pain of dealing with incompatible protocols like JTAG, SWD, and proprietary interfaces from vendors such as NXP, Microchip, and ST. They detail the high cost of commercial tools like the SEGGER J-Link and the risks of relying on bootloaders, citing a $58,000 loss by SparkFun on their MicroView Kickstarter due to a bootloader overwrite error. The hosts advocate for understanding memory maps and linker scripts, and suggest building custom programmers or using open-source tools like OpenOCD to gain deeper knowledge of microcontroller internals and avoid vendor lock-in.