The Scrutiny Debugger webinar is worth a look for embedded developers who need to inspect, tune, and test firmware while the target is still running. In the session, Pier-Yves Lessard presents a workflow built around instrumentation rather than a conventional halt-and-peek probe, which is exactly the sort of thing that becomes useful when a real-time system misbehaves the moment you stop it.

Scrutiny Debugger Webinar

After Elektor’s January feature article, this show moves into the practical side. Lessard shows how the tool can expose variables, plot live signals, and support calibration and testing over links that many engineers already have on their hardware. The underlying instrumentation-based approach is the interesting bit here: instead of treating debugging, telemetry, and production configuration as separate jobs, Scrutiny tries to unify them into one workflow.

What the Scrutiny Debugger Webinar Covers

The Scrutiny Debugger webinar walks through the project’s embedded library, Python server, and client-side tooling, along with the firmware-description step that lets the software understand the target’s data structures. Lessard also covers live variable reads and writes, plotting, dashboards, embedded datalogging, and event-triggered capture for short-lived conditions that ordinary polling can miss. Another useful angle is automation: the project includes a Python SDK, so the same setup can move beyond eyeballing graphs and into repeatable test and HIL workflows through automation hooks.

What Engineers Should Take From It

The practical lesson here is not that instrumentation replaces every classic debugger, because it does not. What it does offer is non-intrusive runtime access over everyday transports such as serial, CAN, UDP, or TCP, plus synchronized sampling that is far more useful in control and power applications than a frozen snapshot. The trade-off is that you need to instrument the firmware properly, and the technique is stronger for global and static data than for arbitrary local-variable spelunking. Even so, for motor control, robotics, power converters, and other embedded systems where timing matters, this is a smart approach. That makes the Scrutiny Debugger webinar more than a product walkthrough; it is a solid introduction to a debugging method that many embedded teams should probably be using more often.

Watch the Session

If you missed the live event on April 9, 2026, watch the recording on YouTube above. It is especially relevant for developers working in embedded C or C++ who want a better handle on calibration, datalogging, and test automation without building a pile of one-off in-house tools for each job.

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