This guide covers setting up and using the Black Magic Probe. The Black Magic Probe is a relatively cheap JTAG/SWD probe for ARM Cortex micro-controllers. A distinguishing feature of the Black Magic Probe is that it embeds a GDB server. As a result, the GNU Debugger can directly connect to the Black Magic Probe. While setting up and using the Black Magic Probe has also been covered in wikis and blogs, I found that those description often only scratched the surface of the subject. With this guide, I set out to give a more comprehensive account.

Several utilities accompagny this guide. Some are small, such as bmscan to locate the (virtual) serial port at which the Black Magic Probe is found. Another is a helper tool for a specific family of micro-controllers (elf-postlink). There are GUI utilities and text-mode utilities. All have been tested under Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Several makefiles are provided for various compilers. Use the one that is appropriate for your system. Most makefiles include a file called "makefile.cfg" for confuguration. Each makefile has a short section near the top to document which macros you can put in makefile.cfg. The file makefile.cfg is not in this repository; it should be written by you. The makefiles also include a dependencies file (if it exists), called "makefile.dep". However, this file is not in the repository either. The project builds without this file, but for tinkering with the code, good dependencies are vital. To get a dependencies file, you need to run make depend. This in turn requires that you have the utility makedepend installed.

Prerequisites are

• libusb-1.0
• glfw-3.3

The development packages for these modules must be present. If you build glfw from source (as a static library), you can configure the path to the include files and the library in makefile.cfg.

A common stumbling block with the MingW compiler is that it lacks the header and library files for WinUSB. The header files are in the Microsoft WDK (and they may come with Visual Studio too). These files have the typical "All rights reserved" copyright banner in the header comment, so I cannot distribute them. You will have to get them from the WDK or another source. The files that it concerns are:

• usb.h
• usb100.h
• usb200.h
• winusb.h
• winusbio.h

The repository for this project contains the file winusb.def. You can use this file to create an import library for MingW using dlltool. The command line options to use are documented on top of the file winusb.def. The location of the header and library files for WinUSB can be set in makefile.cfg, see the Makefile.mingw for details.

The makefile for Visual C/C++ uses Microsoft's nmake, which is a bare-bones make clone. Generating the dependencies does not work yet at this moment.