Newsletter in October 2025

                                   - Gentle and free: Percepio View
                               - Observability of embedded Software
                                - Continuous observability in practice 
                                  - From the lab to field deployment
                                            - Deep dive scenario
                                      - Secure, scalable diagnostics
                                           - Why this is important
                    - Tracealyzer with IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM
                       - SEGGER tools support Geehy G32R50x MCUs

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New to Zephyr or FreeRTOS? The free Percepio View tool gives you a gentle introduction to RTOS tracing. View provides instant visual feedback on what your firmware is doing at runtime: tasks, ISRs, scheduling, and timing without complex setup. Gentle and free: Percepio View   View is a smooth and free way to build intuition: See task execution and basic timing live as you iterate. Verify that your mental model of priorities and blockages matches the device's behavior. Share simple traces/screens with your teammates for quick reviews. Start here to learn the basics, then move on to Percepio Tracealyzer and Detect to dive deeper and leverage automated anomaly detection.

Observability of embedded software Debugging embedded software has never been easy, but today's systems are more complex and interconnected than ever. Real-time operating systems (RTOS) and continuous integration pipelines can accelerate development—but certain types of bugs are difficult to reproduce and diagnose. These elusive problems often occur only under rare conditions, such as time-critical race conditions or bugs that only occur in the field. This is where Continuous Observability based on Percepio Detect comes into play. By combining anomaly detection on the end device with secure, automated snapshots, developers finally gain the visibility they need to move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive quality assurance when developing RTOS-based firmware. The pain of late discovery   The later an error is discovered, the more difficult and costly it is to fix. Developers often receive vague reports from testers or users: “The device crashed, but we don't know why.” Without sufficient runtime diagnostics, reproducing and fixing the problem becomes pure speculation. The problem is even more pronounced with RTOS-based applications. Errors such as deadlocks, race conditions, memory leaks, and priority inversions may only occur occasionally, rendering conventional testing and logging ineffective.

Continuous Observability in practice   Continuous Observability integrates resource-efficient monitoring into your devices' firmware. Instead of streaming huge amounts of data, Percepio Detect runs unobtrusively in the background and detects anomalies such as crashes, hangs, or performance deviations. When something unusual happens, Detect captures a detailed snapshot of the system state at the time of the error—including the last RTOS events and the call stack of the current thread. From the lab to field deployment   In testing: Detect integrates with your CI pipelines and enables automatic detection of hard-to-find errors and crashes that can occur during nightly builds or stress tests. Detect can also uncover hidden risks, such as when a dangerous threshold, like a watchdog reset, is almost reached. In the morning, engineers will find a dashboard with highlighted anomalies and links to complete diagnostic data—ready for a quick root cause analysis. In action: When deployed field devices encounter unexpected problems, Detect can reliably log snapshots for remote retrieval, even if the connection is only intermittent. This ensures that no problem goes undetected and no customer issue becomes a blind spot.

Deep dive scenario Assumed scenario: A sporadic crash on a Cortex-M4 device using FreeRTOS, caused by a rare priority inversion. Detect workflow: When the crash occurs, Detect records a snapshot and a brief trace of the events that led to the error. Analysis: When opening the trace in Percepio Tracealyzer, the developer sees that a lower-priority thread blocked a resource needed for a critical task, resulting in a watchdog timeout and a system restart. With this insight, the problem can be reproduced and fixed in hours instead of weeks. Secure, scalable diagnostics   Unlike some observability platforms that require memory dumps and ELF files to be uploaded to an external cloud service, sensitive diagnostic data remains under your control with Percepio Detect. The data can be shared within your team via the Detect server dashboard, but remains within your infrastructure, ensuring IP security and compliance with data protection regulations such as the GDPR. This architecture scales seamlessly from lab setups with a handful of devices to production environments with thousands of connected endpoints without compromising security.

Why this is important By leveraging Percepio's Continuous Observability, development teams can: Identify critical issues earlier in the lifecycle Shorten debugging cycles with actionable, visual diagnostics Improve the reliability and safety of deployed devices Reduce the cost and risk of late-stage failures and recalls   Additional information and resources Discover Percepio Detect Discover Percepio Tracealyzer Read the white paper on continuous observability Request a demo of Percepio Detect

Tracealyzer with IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM    Are you using IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM with an IAR I-jet probe? Did you know that this provides an excellent data channel for Tracealyzer trace streaming? Percepio has updated Percepio Application Note PA-023 with easy setup for trace streaming via ITM/SWO, made possible by improvements in IAR's ITM logging support. This makes it easier than ever to combine IAR's powerful debugging capabilities with Tracealyzer's RTOS-level insights.   Read the updated guide. IAR already has powerful debugging and tracing capabilities, but does not offer an RTOS-enabled tracing feature that allows you to track the interaction between threads and kernel services in real time. With Tracealyzer, you get: A complete timeline of all RTOS threads, ISRs, and system events. Immediate visibility when a task is delayed, interrupted, or blocked. Powerful views for CPU utilization, task execution times, and resource usage. The ability to quickly understand complex runtime interactions that are difficult to detect with traditional debugging methods.

SEGGER tools support Geehy G32R50x MCUs   SEGGER's market-leading J-Link debug probes and Flasher in-system programmers can now be used with Geehy's G32R50x series of real-time microcontrollers (MCUs). The G32R50x MCUs are based on the ARM Cortex-M52 core and offer powerful real-time control functions. Thanks to their high computing power, precise sensors, and reliable peripheral control, the series is particularly suitable for applications in the fields of photovoltaics, industrial automation, commercial power supply, and electric and new energy vehicles. SEGGER J-Link debug probes are among the most widely used debug probes in the field of embedded systems. In addition to their outstanding performance, they offer numerous features, including fast downloading of programs to a device's flash memory and support for virtually any CPU. This has established J-Link as the preferred tool for embedded developers in a wide range of industries. SEGGER Flashers enable in-system programming of microcontrollers directly on the production line. They offer robust, secure, and scalable solutions for all programming requirements – from prototype testing to series production. This allows users to program non-volatile flash memory in microcontrollers, system-on-chips, and external SPI flash memories. In addition, the Flashers support serial and parallel data transfer via multiple I/O pins. J-Link support gives Geehy users access to SEGGER's cross-platform debugger and performance analyzer Ozone, as well as SEGGER's complete development ecosystem, including Embedded Studio, SystemView, state-of-the-art software libraries, and emPower OS. A complete list of devices supported by J-Link and J-Trace can be found here, and for Flashers here.

Lots of new things for this fall. I wish you every success in choosing your tools and realizing your plans. Sincerely Yours Marian A. Wosnitza   Never start to stop, never stop to start. (Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 to 43 BC, Roman lawyer, philosopher, and politician)