Who has used the Virtual Bread Board with the propeller?

turbosupra

http://www.virtualbreadboard.com/


I see that it has support for the bs2 and the author said they are working on integrating some "independent propeller projects" to this virtual bread board.


I was looking for something that would help me learn the effect of placing different components in the circuit, and monitoring how they effect things. I wouldn't mind picking up books too, if any had an suggestions on how different components effect a circuit, but if the VBB software worked, it seems like that'd be pretty awesome.

Drone

Where did you see virtualbreadboard mention pending support for propeller (link?)
If anything emerges from them, it will likely be at-first a single cog PASM simulation
(which would be nice in and of itself). ViewPort ($$$ not open) has a Spin
simulator if memory-serves.

I'd like to see the propeller in some form added to the free VMLAB www.amctools.com.

There are some other propeller emulator (simulator?) tools described here:

propeller.wikispaces.com/Debuggers+and+Emulators

I really wish there was a full spin/pasm simulator included with the prop tool.
Dragging around propeller hardware, especially through airports, is a major
pain.

Regards, David

turbosupra

Hi David,

When I saw the basic stamp listed, I decided to email the software support and act, here is what they told me


[noparse][[/noparse]quote]

There are a couple of open-source projects which we plan to evaluate and integrate one of them into VBB

Will probably be a few months so I suggest you get going with one of the simulators – google is your friend




If viewport has this, I'll just buy viewport, it's only $30 bucks. Does viewport have the hardware component simulation portion?

Drone said...
Where did you see virtualbreadboard mention pending support for propeller (link?)
If anything emerges from them, it will likely be at-first a single cog PASM simulation
(which would be nice in and of itself). ViewPort ($$$ not open) has a Spin
simulator if memory-serves.

I'd like to see the propeller in some form added to the free VMLAB www.amctools.com.

There are some other propeller emulator (simulator?) tools described here:

propeller.wikispaces.com/Debuggers+and+Emulators

I really wish there was a full spin/pasm simulator included with the prop tool.
Dragging around propeller hardware, especially through airports, is a major
pain.

Regards, David

Mike Green

Viewport doesn't have a hardware simulator. It's designed to be used with an actual Propeller, mostly for debugging and monitoring.

Have a look at the "wikispaces.com" link. There are several debuggers / simulators for the Propeller for simulating code, either assembly or Spin. None of them will do what you want though.

turbosupra

That's a shame

It'd be nice to see a visual demonstration of what the prop was doing if you pushed some code you wrote to it. If you could see the values coming out of the pins and see how each pin was configured and how that effected the chip, that'd be awesome.

Mike Green said...
Viewport doesn't have a hardware simulator. It's designed to be used with an actual Propeller, mostly for debugging and monitoring.

Have a look at the "wikispaces.com" link. There are several debuggers / simulators for the Propeller for simulating code, either assembly or Spin. None of them will do what you want though.

hover1

In Viewport you can see a visual of each pin in real time. You could also display variables. It does not have any analog in, if that's what's your looking for.

Have you tried it yet? Great piece of software.



Jim

turbosupra said...
That's a shame

It'd be nice to see a visual demonstration of what the prop was doing if you pushed some code you wrote to it. If you could see the values coming out of the pins and see how each pin was configured and how that effected the chip, that'd be awesome.

Mike Green said...
Viewport doesn't have a hardware simulator. It's designed to be used with an actual Propeller, mostly for debugging and monitoring.

Have a look at the "wikispaces.com" link. There are several debuggers / simulators for the Propeller for simulating code, either assembly or Spin. None of them will do what you want though.

turbosupra

I have not tried it, maybe I should give it a try though.

I'm pretty new at the propeller, and it seems like a tool geared towards advanced users, I'm looking for a tool that will make it easier for me to learn being new, what do you think?

Hanno

ViewPort does not have a simulator, but it does let you watch the variables and IO states of your real Propeller. It also let's you "step" through your spin program, one line at a time from a breakpoint, while watching memory change. To monitor analog values, you'll need to read them into the Propeller- ViewPort includes several sample programs that do this- one uses the built-in mic from the demoboard to input sound for analysis with the spectrum analyzer, the other uses a cheap <$5 ADC chip to input NTSC signals (like that going into your tv) to help you understand that waveform and/or do simple vision processing on the Propeller.

ViewPort has a lot of capabilities, but should be straightforward to use by beginners- start of with the samples or Andy's excellent PE Lab. Let me know if you need help. See my signature for a review.

I wrote 12Blocks to help true novices start with robotics- my 5 year old daughter loves it! It includes support for the most common peripherals. See signature for link and tutorial.

A "friend" is developing a simulator for 12Blocks- coming soon!
Hanno

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Co-author of the official Propeller Guide- available at Amazon
Developer of ViewPort, the premier visual debugger for the Propeller (read the review here, thread here),
12Blocks, the block-based programming environment (thread here)
and PropScope, the multi-function USB oscilloscope/function generator/logic analyzer

turbosupra

Wow Hanno, view port and 12blocks are freakin awesome! ( I hope I can write other programs that aren't robotics related with 12 blocks? )

I'm going to try and build a program now with 12 blocks and see how I do

What would be nice is if there was a virtual breadboard that I could define input voltages and play around with resistors, capacitors, transistors, opamps and the like, and see what would happen in a circuit if I placed them to it, to learn how the hardware interacted with the electrons. It'd be nice to visually see what happened with voltage values after you place a pull up or pull down resistor or something like that, basically a true virtual bread board.

This is probably way to complicated to write/develop, but I thought I'd throw it out there.


By the way, is there any way I can get a 2 licenses for 1 deal, if I buy viewport and 12 blocks at the same time today/tomorrow?

Hanno said...
ViewPort does not have a simulator, but it does let you watch the variables and IO states of your real Propeller. It also let's you "step" through your spin program, one line at a time from a breakpoint, while watching memory change. To monitor analog values, you'll need to read them into the Propeller- ViewPort includes several sample programs that do this- one uses the built-in mic from the demoboard to input sound for analysis with the spectrum analyzer, the other uses a cheap <$5 ADC chip to input NTSC signals (like that going into your tv) to help you understand that waveform and/or do simple vision processing on the Propeller.

ViewPort has a lot of capabilities, but should be straightforward to use by beginners- start of with the samples or Andy's excellent PE Lab. Let me know if you need help. See my signature for a review.

I wrote 12Blocks to help true novices start with robotics- my 5 year old daughter loves it! It includes support for the most common peripherals. See signature for link and tutorial.

A "friend" is developing a simulator for 12Blocks- coming soon!
Hanno

Hanno

Hi Turbosupra,
I like "freakin awesome"! Thanks for the compliment.
Check out this tutorial- lot's of non-robotics projects shown: 12blocks.com/tutorial.pdf
Sure, pm me to get a $10 discount for buying both 12blocks and ViewPort...
Hanno

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Co-author of the official Propeller Guide- available at Amazon
Developer of ViewPort, the premier visual debugger for the Propeller (read the review here, thread here),
12Blocks, the block-based programming environment (thread here)
and PropScope, the multi-function USB oscilloscope/function generator/logic analyzer

Mike Huselton

Turbosupra,

It is called a SPICE simulator. Expect to pay $1000 - $5000 for it. And don't expect to find a Propeller simulator to run with the SPICE outerware.
The Prop is too new and/or specialized.

Stick with Hanno - he will not steer you wrong.

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JMH

Post Edited (Mike Huselton) : 12/26/2009 9:42:21 PM GMT

turbosupra

Wow! That definitely isn't worth that too me, I thought I saw a spice simulator for $200 (5spice), and I thought that was way too much. I'm not making a commercial product.

http://www.5spice.com/register___buy.htm

Mike Huselton said...
Turbosupra,

It is called a SPICE simulator. Expect to pay $1000 - $5000 for it. And don't expect to find a Propeller simulator to run with the SPICE outerware.
The Prop is too new and/or specialized.

Drone

Turbosipura,

You don't have to pay thousands for a high quality SPICE suite, nor do you have to suffer (IMHO) with the likes of 5Spice. LTSpiceIV is a professional SPICE environment for Windows (only). It is proprietary but free and un-crippled, even for commercial use. You don't even need to register or provide your email address. LTSpice is developed and supported by Linear Technologies Inc. Below are the download link and a link to the independent but large and active LTSpice Yahoo Group. There are lots of examples and additional models in the files area of the Yahoo Group.

www.linear.com/designtools/software/ltspice.jsp

tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/LTspice/

In the Yahoo Group under the Links area there are lots of links to tutorials. There's a nice two part introductory video tutorial here:

claymore.engineer.gvsu.edu/~steriana/Videos/

Mike is correct, you won't find a microcontroller in most SPICE applications. SPICE is more for analog simulation, but in LTSpiceIV for-example you can install the 74XX library and easily simulate combinational and sequential logic in a mixed signal environment; but as with any SPICE engine you might need to tweak the computational settings when there are a lot of transients taking place.

If you follow a decent tutorial you will be doing basic simulations in LTSpice within an hour. But as with any piece of very powerful software, becoming a power user will take longer.

Regards, David