Can't debug UART communication properly from GPS to STM32

Question

I'm trying to debug my NEO7M GPS-tracker with STM32H7. NEO chip has UART interface so I set up UART and start coding (Keil v5). It's clear but not for me.

What's going on here:

NEO7M is transmitting data periodically so it looks like DATA----IDLE----DATA----IDLE. All I need is to receive the whole information and send it to some parsing functions.

In main.c I have this:

ReadGPS(RecievedData);
ReadTime(RecievedData, Time);

And these functions look like this:

void ReadGPS(char *RecievedData){
    HAL_UARTEx_ReceiveToIdle_IT(&huart1, (uint8_t*)RecievedData, GPS_DATA_SIZE);
}

void ReadTime(char *RecievedData, uint8_t *Time){
    ***parsing algorithm***
}

So I'm pulling RecievedData pointer to ReadGPS function, reading payload and then using RecievedData in parsing function. Great!

My problem:

If I start a debug session without any breakpoints, in Watch Window data in RecievedData variable changes and parsers work great. BUT when I start using breakpoints, only first symbol of RecievedData is changing, and another 400 symbols are the same as before, and parsers give me wrong information. I tried to use UART receiving function without interrupt, but got the same.

UPD:

This is how it looks like when code running without breakpoints. I see whole UART data packet updating every second.

When I use step by step mode only the first symbol of recieved data is updating.

Answer 1

The problem could be if you debug, the GPS doesn't stop sending data and the buffers fill up. This means you need to have some kind of code to clear the receive buffer or handle the case of receiving two or more packets or half a packet. The way to know is check the receive buffer while debugging and compare the received packet with a normal packet.

Answer 2

Do I understand correctly that (A) the GPS just continually spews data packets, and (B) you have code that successfully receives the packets, and (C) you are trying to debug higher-level code that does something with the packets that have been received?

If all those things are true, then I would write a program to capture a whole sequence of packets to a file, and then I would debug and/or test the higher-level code on my development PC while it reads the saved packets from a file.