Lauterbach and Arduino: free Pro tools for makers and students

Lauterbach, the World’s leading debug tools provider for embedded systems, extends the range of Arduino supported boards and devices. Following the successful integration with the Arduino Pro Portenta H7, TRACE32® now adds support for the Arduino Nano 33 BLE and Nano 33 BLE Sense.

Arduino is the first widespread Open-Source hardware project and, since 2005, has become almost ubiquitous in microcontroller projects. The Arduino Pro line is aimed at the more professional user who needs the extra power and flexibility of a dual-core architecture like Portenta H7, and TRACE32®, with its industry leading debug features, is ideal for these developers. Now, TRACE32® can also be used, free of charge, with Nano 33 BLE, a very common board in the maker community and the educational and IoT fields.

Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense is a nano-sized board with Bluetooth connectivity and well equipped with sensors which include a 9-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU) which adds a compass to the usual gyroscope and accelerometer, a microphone, a light and color sensor, gesture sensor, as well as temperature, humidity and air pressure sensors.

The board is based on the uBlox Bluetooth module including a 64 MHz Arm Cortex® M4F core from Nordic Semiconductor running Mbed OS, an OS for Arm-based embedded systems which allows simultaneous execution of multiple threads. This makes it ideally suited for Machine Learning experimentation using the TensorFlow Lite and tinyML libraries.

Each Nano 33 BLE device will have a unique serial number and this can be used to download a free copy of the TRACE32® debugger that will be licensed for use with that board via a serial port.

For users who require more advanced debug and trace features, the hardware based µTrace® tool can be purchased from Lauterbach and requires soldering a SWD header on to the board.

According to Maurizio Menegotto, Managing Director of Lauterbach S.r.l.: “This is a meeting of minds of two of the biggest forces in embedded computing and I am waiting with anticipation to see where the vibrant Arduino community takes this. We are honored to be working with Arduino on this exciting project which involves the educational world and the wide community of makers and look forward to welcoming the next generation of embedded engineers to the Lauterbach community.”

Arduino Pro Portenta H7 and Nano 33 BLE boards are already available through the normal Arduino sales channels.