Test Framework?

lassethomsen

Hi.

I have been looking for at test framework to use together with the propeller chip, but unfortunately my search was unsuccesfull.

Is there a test framework? And/how do people her test the code?

Mike Green

There is no test framework.

One of the forum members has been working on a Propeller simulator that may be very useful for some projects (http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=624986), but, given the speed difference, this is more useful for teaching and learning than for involved projects.

There are plenty of tools to use for debugging in that you can attach multiple keyboards and displays to a Propeller or trivially add a serial port (if you have extra I/O pins available) and this extra I/O runs completely independently of anything else running. Essentially, you can create a specialized debugger fairly easily that runs in parallel with your program. Since the I/O pins are shared among the cogs, you can create a simulator for attached devices that can be driven by the extra keyboard and display. For example, there was a program that used an external Stamp as a slave processor. I wrote a simple Stamp emulator that would look at the (unconnected) I/O pins going to the Stamp, interpret what was seen, and respond by driving the (unconnected) I/O pins that would have come from the Stamp. I don't remember whether I had an independent TV display going to show what was happening, but I did do something like that with another project. On the Demo Board, you can have a TV and VGA display simultaneously and two keyboards (one using the mouse PS/2 connector).