I recently updated my MPLAB X installation to version 5.10. The compiler hasn’t changed, just the IDE. Two surprises occurred. First is that my SAMD board now crashes the IDE when I plug it in. Only on Windows 10 on my HP tablet. Works fine on my Mac. But I won’t get into that today.
Today, I discovered that I broke my breakpoints using my PIC16 board. Specifically, using the PIC16f1619 Curiosity board. It’s a relatively simple 8-bit device with a single hardware breakpoint in it. It appears that I’ve been misusing hardware breakpoints in C for a few years because of this warning:
As of version 5.10 (Nov. 2018) MPLAB X now asks you explicitly to enable software breakpoints.
Never got this warning before so remained oblivious to the practical implementation of software breakpoints versus hardware ones. I typically put a single breakpoint in and let the code boot up and halt at it. Then, single-step to see what’s going on. Apparently, that requires the use of additional software breakpoints. Well, now I know better. The software breakpoints add a bit of assembler code where you can’t see it to halt the code. Time to get used to it.