Novosibirsk State Technical University has developed software that will allow developers to remotely debug embedded microprocessor systems in real time, eliminating possible errors and, significantly speeding up the development process.
Thanks to the victory in the business accelerator program And:The launch, held with the support of the Government of the Novosibirsk region, the Digital points team received a ticket to the business incubator of the Academic Park. In parallel, the developers have started the procedure for opening an LLC, which is planned to be registered as a resident of the business incubator of the Academic Park in the future.
"The debugging process (finding and correcting errors in the source code) is necessary for all electronic devices with an intelligent control system. Usually, this process looks like this: the programmer writes code that gives the necessary control signals to the device, and then manually analyzes which errors occurred and for what reason. However, there are situations in which the developer cannot stop the system at any point in time for debugging, for example, the operation of a conveyor or the flight of a drone. It is in such circumstances that there is a need for a special software tool that would allow you to monitor and analyze internal processes remotely in real time," Nikita Sevostyanov, one of the developers of the project, a graduate student at the Faculty of Radio Engineering and Electronics of NSTU-NETI.
Digital Points is a smart debugger for embedded real—time microprocessor systems. The program helps to automate the analysis of signals, characteristics, and settings of the embedded software of electronic devices. The system is quite easy to use: the developer needs to download the software from the website. Then at the stage of creating a new device, a special software library is implemented into the code, which collects data for further visualization and analysis. Next, the developers run the program on the computer and track the necessary data. This makes the debugging process as automated as possible.
"According to our research, 36% of their working time specialists debug embedded software of electronic devices blindly or spend this time developing low-quality software for them. In this regard, work on creating a ready-made device slows down significantly, and there is also a risk of losing the same device due to incorrect decisions based on debugging results due to human factors. Our device allows you to significantly reduce the required working time because, unlike similar systems, the advantage of the program developed at NSTU-NETI is its extended functionality: in addition to the basic monitoring function, the debugger is already able to measure frequency characteristics, analyze signals, and perform spectral analysis," Nikita added.
At the moment, several Russian companies are already testing Novosibirsk’s software developers. The next stage is the full launch and commercialization of the product.