IDE with emulation!

[Luciano]

Another worthwhile mention is that, if a circuit works on vero or breadboard, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will work as planed on a PCB. Conductors have both capacitance and resistance attributes which can effect the proper operation of many circuits. In particular with RF and audio designs. Even some digital too.

Poorly designed audio is very distinctly noticeable to the human ear - noise introduced perhaps because of an earth loop - while RF based designs may often just refuse to work. Another consideration is track width on a PCB, you may have used heavy-duty hookup wire for these parts on some vero-board, works fine perhaps, but on the PCB the width may be insufficient to handle the amount of required current.

Plus…
On breadboard or vero the design may work well, perhaps because of the exact layout of the components? When you take it to PCB it might produce an adverse result because you changed things. If this is the case then you have effectively taken a step backwards.

Hi Trent,

All that applies also if you simulate your circuit on the screen of a PC.

Best regards,

Luciano

[mister_e]

Some SIMS may have their advantage indeed... now i'm from the old school, and the old approach always serves me well.

Yes i agree there's some good point in a sim, but 'till now none of what's already on the market tun me on. 'Till now i think only NI MultiSim got more points than other... but to sim PIC or else micro... the list is just too limited.

Proteus... is probably the best for what we do... but it's actually a pain to use and a little bit too limited on the analog section. I read it could be possible to ask for some model if needed. If free SPICE model where easy to plug-in... now it could bee much cool. Maybe they're actually work on something like that... who knows?

This said, they're suppose to send me their latest version (7.0) in the next days/week. I'll give a better test drive..

For the PCB... all good point as well. But if you really want to sim a PCB with every possible situation, you would have to enter tons of parameters first, and IF the Sims can do it... you would probably have never saved any time.

If a SIM coulod do the exact job (PCB, digital, analog... ) and was 100% reliable... it's cost will certainely be more than 1,2 thousands dollars. Wich is something a hobbyist would never afford or be tempted by.

Sure todays component size makes the prototyping task a little bit hard, but it's still doable, even with home-made PCBs.

Oh well, maybe SIM are the future, but for now, i still prefer the good ol' method.

[T.Jackson]

While I have never actually test-driven Proteus, but like with pretty much anything else that's new in this World, willing to bet that there's a steep new learning curve involved. I can even picture it being quite daunting too.

Could it be anymore complex than manually routing a double sided through hole plated PCB with silkscreen masks? If it is, then it’s really not in line with my suggestion. If you Require a science degree to drive it then it would be very seldom that it would appeal to anyone without this degree. Makes matters even worse if there are actually genuine flaws with it too.

Can MELabs come up with a better solution that is low in cost, reliable, easy-to-use and pretty much entirely specific to the range of PICs that their brilliant compiler supports? At least my wish is clear.

Best Regards,
Trent Jackson

[mister_e]

Firsts times when i tried it, Proteus was a real pain in the *** to use and set-up. Even the first DOS version of SPICE (P-SPICE) was easier to use.. those who remind of it

By what their sales representative said to me about the new version 7.0....

This Version has a new user interface and is much easer to use.

I wish... Oh well, even if it was just time to be comfortable with... no big deal. The MAIN problem is always...

May i trust it?

time will tell.

http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/show...hlight=proteus

Now you can also try the PROTEUS MPLAB plugin if you want.

[T.Jackson]

I say give it time it'll get better. There's obviously a very mixed bag of feelings towards simulators on this forum. While I realize that simulators have been around since late DOS days, but with the way in which we know of them today, It's still relatively new technology in my book. Attempting to emulate the exact behavior of 1,000’s upon 1,000’s of parts would be a very cumbersome chore. With digital electronics, it either works or it doesn’t. In the analog domain it’s an entirely different story…

Few years ago I took the opportunity of test driving a simulator called Crocodile Clips. Windows-based, included a modest library of parts, resistors, capacitors, CMOS 4000 series of logic IC’s, BJT’s, - (Bipolar Junctions Transistors) – LED’s, buzzers, pretty much all of the commonly used active & passive components.

I was quite impressed, and a little disappointed too. I strapped together a light chaser circuit in about 20 mins, using the built-in signal generator as the clock source. Then I tried to make a relaxation oscillator using a Schmitt triggered NAND gate with calculated R & C for a 10Hz clock. Didn’t work. The simulator didn’t have the ability to emulate the true characteristics of Schmitt trigger NAND gate with feedback. Interestingly though, it could actually emulate a typical RC time-constant.

Best regards,
Trent Jackson

[T.Jackson]

December of last year I wrote an emulator to simulate a real-World project that was published in the Silicon Chip magazine back in 1999. A 32 LED microcontroller-based Christmas tree. The tree uses bi-colour LEDs and has a seemingly endless array of patterns, which are stored in an onboard EEPROM.

So taken by this tree, I decided to write an emulator for it. It's not identical to the original and it's far from perfect. There is about 100K of unavoidable source code in it. An absolutely ridiculous amount of time was spent on this project in attempts to simulate the behavior of something that is ultimately quite simple in real life.

http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb...67268&lngWId=1

Best Regards,
Trent Jackson

[Luciano]

Hi Trent,

I have downloaded your Dynamic LED XMAS Tree. (VB6 source code).
From what I can see the object-oriented capabilities of Visual Basic 6.0
have not been used. The LEDs of your program are a perfect example where
the use of object-oriented programming could bring real benefits.

For more fun use:

Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition which can be downlaoded for free:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/

or

Visual C# Express which is also free:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ex...p/default.aspx

Best regards,

Luciano