This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
When you want to debug your projects using dw-link more than once, it is a good idea to have a hardware solution. For instance, an Arduino shield. As described in the manual, you can just assemble a solution on a prototype board, which works for 5 V projects with less than 20 mA of supply current.
The current design of the dw-link probe is more ambitious, but far from an industrial-strength hardware debugging tool as, e.g., Atmel ICE. The limitations for the target boards are:
- 3.3 to 5 V supply voltage (but not lower),
- reasonable loads on the SPI lines, e.g., an LED and a 1 kΩ series resistor (but no stronger resistor),
- no capacitive load on the RESET line of the target,
- no loads higher than a 10 kΩ resistance on the RESET line,
- minimum target MCU clock frequency of 4 kHz.
If these constraints are met, the dw-link probe should work. Otherwise, one might encounter strange behavior and/or error messages.
The current version (V3.1) of the dw-link probe (an Arduino UNO shield) uses mainly THT components, which should make it easy to assemble it using these instructions. The three SMD components can also be hand-soldered to the PCB since the solder pads are extra large.