Description

The Raspberry Pi Debug Probe is an all-in-one USB-to-debug kit that provides all the necessary hardware and cables for easy, solderless, plug-and-play debugging. It features both a processor serial debug interface (by default the Arm Serial Wire Debug interface, but other interfaces can be supported) and an industry-standard UART interface. Both interfaces use the Raspberry Pi 3-pin debug connector, as detailed in the Raspberry Pi 3-pin Debug Connector Specification.

The Raspberry Pi Debug Probe is a kit comprising the Debug Probe hardware in its own plastic case together with a USB cable and three types of debug cable, covering the vast majority of debug use cases. It is designed to make it easy to debug and program Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040 with a range of host platforms including Windows, Mac, and typical Linux computers, where you don’t have a GPIO header to connect directly to the Pico’s serial UART or SWD port.

While designed for use with Raspberry Pi products such as the Pico and Raspberry Pi 5, the Debug Probe provides standard UART and CMSIS-DAP interfaces over USB, so it can also be used to debug any Arm-based microcontroller that provides an SWD port with 3V3 I/O, or even just as a USB-to-UART cable. It works with OpenOCD and other tools that support CMSIS-DAP.

The Debug Probe is based on Raspberry Pi Pico hardware and runs the open source Raspberry Pi Picoprobe software. The firmware is updated in the same way as Raspberry Pi Pico firmware, so it is easy to keep the unit up to date with the latest firmware, or to use custom firmware.