Hello,
I’m looking at the new Spark Photon to use for a project. I want to know what IDEs can be used for bare metal programming of the Photon and also what debug capabilities are available.
I did some searching and around not find a comprehensive list of what is supported.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Please direct you attention to http://community.spark.io/t/local-development-and-debugging-a-step-by-step-guide/7829 and come back if you have an additional questions! 
Additionally, I’m not sure they have published anything substantial regarding “base metal” programming the Photon just yet. Perhaps give it a bit more time.
Thanks for pointing me to that post. VERY good information, but the process is QUITE involved.
It is unfortunate that most of these make the IOT easier boards are so difficult to do proper debugging.
I do agree with you however I think these IOT boards are making things easier (RF design, communicaiton, apis, etc) just not debugging… the software part seems to be up to the user for the most part.
Yeah, I DO want the software up to me. It’s a good thing, but nobody seems to have focused on local build/debug. Disappointing because I’m writing a fairly complex bit of TCP/IP based code that I would DIE to be able to step through! (I’m more of a let’s try it and see what went wrong type coder!)
Only the setup requires some effort (but neatly explained in that post above) - once initial setup is done, debugging is simply a matter of clicking a button and stepping through the code. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
For bare metal programming, you have these options:
Both options allow you to write the bootloader and the main firmware so you can take full control of the device.
@mdma The FTDI based debugger shield sounds like a perfect solution for me. Can you share any details of when it might be available?