Hi,
Does anyone know of a software emulator for any of the rabbit core modules? This would be a great development tool and would significantly reduce the wear and tear on actual modules, and probably greatly reduce development time.
Selfishly, I’d prefer it that if there was an emulator, that it was for the RCM2200 
There are not any software emulators that I am aware of. The main reason we have never pursued a software emulator is the main area Rabbit modules and SBC’s are used is in control or communications environments. Often this involves specialized circuitry or real world devices that are difficult to simulate in a software environment. Simulating the processor is not that difficult, it’s everything around the processor that it is working with that is the challenge. Since many of our products are core modules, the type of circuitry they get tied to varies greatly by our customers applications.
The other problem with simulation is that it is hard to guage what level of power you are going to get from an 8-bit processor. You could have something that works fine on a simulator running on your Pentium 4, but when you try to get your RCM2200 to keep up with the same load, it might not.
Using the real world processor to build and debug your code has many advantages. Besides, the only part you could wear out on a core module is the flash memory, and most of those are rated in the 100K cycle range, which in itself is somewhat conservative. At 100K cycles, you could re-program your core module 100 times a day, EVERY DAY, and still take about 3 years before you might wear it out.
Bill,
Many thanks for the detailed response!
I understand all the points you have raised, but must say that having worked with emulators (not simulators) in other environments it is something that I do miss when working with Rabbit.
I hear what you are saying about life cycles and so on, but the truth is that I have several ‘dead’ rabbits on my bench which have inexplicably refused to be programmed any more, and I am not alone in that! See the RabbitSemi Yahoo group for many posts on this issue.
A simulator would be great for testing those tiny code changes that frustrate as you have to compile and flash every time. How about pre-compile headers and libs - that would cut the compile and flash time to seconds!
Finally, thanks again for taking the time to reply.
Here’s to many more years taming the rabbit.
(Bet you’ve not heard that one before!)
-LHM
Hi,
Can I say that there no emulators any Rabbit at all? I need a emulator to simulate Command Line Interface(CLI) and not the Rabbit module itself.
Do you have any idea of this? I am using Eclipse to manage my coding but when I compile, I use Dynamic C… and I will need to upload the binary file into the Rabbit module in order to test how my CLI coding will response to user input…
Somewhat similar to a Router’s CLI…
Thanks so much. I hope this post is not irrelevant
Dav :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=bsprouse;2485]There are not any software emulators that I am aware of. The main reason we have never pursued a software emulator is the main area Rabbit modules and SBC’s are used is in control or communications environments. Often this involves specialized circuitry or real world devices that are difficult to simulate in a software environment. Simulating the processor is not that difficult, it’s everything around the processor that it is working with that is the challenge. Since many of our products are core modules, the type of circuitry they get tied to varies greatly by our customers applications.
The other problem with simulation is that it is hard to guage what level of power you are going to get from an 8-bit processor. You could have something that works fine on a simulator running on your Pentium 4, but when you try to get your RCM2200 to keep up with the same load, it might not.
Using the real world processor to build and debug your code has many advantages. Besides, the only part you could wear out on a core module is the flash memory, and most of those are rated in the 100K cycle range, which in itself is somewhat conservative. At 100K cycles, you could re-program your core module 100 times a day, EVERY DAY, and still take about 3 years before you might wear it out.[/quote]