Virtual prototype board.

Beavis3215

Is there any such thing as a virtual prototype board equivalent to the ones Parallax sells for the Propeller?

Beavis3215

I guess not, would probably be a good invention.

Duane Degn

I don't think I understand what you mean by a "virtual prototype board." Would this be some sort of computer program?

Beavis3215

Yes, A computer graphic representation of say a propeller activity board wx, that interacts with a programmed propeller chip as the hardware activity board would. Like a simulation of the hardware. The propeller chip itself could probably be simulated as well.

localroger

The thing is the Propeller does some things that are very hard for a PC to do, even though the PC might be many times more powerful in absolute terms. The Propeller has 8 cores running at the same time, without interrupts messing with their timing, and each cog also has a powerful counter/timer, PLL, and video generator that can do things that require a lot of code for a PC to emulate. In today's terms the Prop is a low power chip capable of doing far more than it really should be capable of. And some of that is beyond what even a PC can do; for example, I have had a single Propeller generating three different NTSC video outputs at the same time. Good luck emulating that.

Dave Hein

There are two simulators for the Propeller -- Gear and SpinSim. I've never used Gear, but it might be a good starting point for creating a virtual prototyping board. It has a graphical interface, and I believe plugins can be added that simulate external devices.

The other simulator is one that I wrote called SpinSim. It uses a command-line interface, and contains a simple debugger that can set breakpoints. SpinSim can also simulate the P2, but it's not up to date with the latest P2 changes.