Make your debugging life easier with preprocessor marcos

These tips maybe useful for you when you need to debug your code without a real debugger. Typically, you will push variables's value to some displays such as the console on Windows/ Linux or the "Serial monitor" on Arduino. And when you don't want to see those outputs anymore, you delete those "cout"/ "print" lines, or better to comment them out.

You can save yourself from manually comment/ uncomment those lines (maybe scattered all over the place) repeatedly. Simple put this at the start of your source file:

1	#define DEBUG

And wrap your debugging lines with this:

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#ifdef DEBUG ... Serial.print(x); or ... cout << x << endl; ... #endif

From now on, you can quickly toggle debugging output by comment/ uncomment the #define line.

There's also the inverted version. For example, only output PWM to motors when not debugging:

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#ifndef DEBUG motor_set(pwm) #endif

You can have as many flags as you want. 1 flag for each module, 1 flag to toggle timing function execution...

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#define DEBUG_SPEED #define DEBUG_POSITION #define TIME

You can also execute "or" operation. For example, on Arduino, we need to enable Serial to push out debugging values:

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#if defined(DEBUG) || defined(TIME) Serial.begin(115200); #endif

Hope these tips can help you.