11 years ago.  This question has been closed. Reason: OK, now with what Erik and Carl added, I understand. Thanks all!.

printf to USB serial for debugging

So, it seems Elektor publishers were overstocked with LPC11U24s, because they were offering these as an incentive for subscription renewal. So, I ended up with one of these.

For some time I have been thinking of making a small midi file player, with the thought that I might then extend it to flash some lights, or maybe animate one or more of those toys that seem to come out at this time of year as Christmas approaches. I was considering something like the ETT STM32 board, like this http://www.futurlec.com/STM32_Development_Board.shtml, with the midi files on a SD card.

Now I am wondering if the LPC11U24 could be persuaded to do something like this. With that I could dispense with the SD card and put the files, which are not very big, on the Local File System. It would be a bit of a challenge with only 8K of RAM, particularly to support "format 1" (multi-track) midi files, but I decided to have a go.

So I lifted up a midi file player program and tried to cram it into the LPC11U24. I ran into some trouble but one of the main problems at the moment is that I cannot get printf debugging messages to work through USB serial. I read the SerialPC page, https://mbed.org/handbook/SerialPC, but I still have no luck. I have installed the required Windows driver, and that works because I get output from other example programs, and even from other small programs of mine, but for my midi file playing program I get nothing. The program sails past various printf statements as if they are not there. I put one right after the entry point of main, and I still see nothing, so it does not appear to be something that the program does while running that breaks it, but rather something it contains, or does not contain, or something???

Any suggestions about how to find why printf does not work for this one program?

I'm getting tired of flashing out messages in code on the leds.