What is Visual Designer?

Visual Designer for Arduino combines world class Proteus VSM simulation with an easy to use flowchart editor and a gallery of virtual hardware to provide a truly integrated and intuitive development environment for Arduino.

The peripheral gallery makes hardware design easy. Simply add a shield or sensor from the gallery and Visual Designer will automatically place the correct circuitry on the Proteus schematic for you and add some simple methods to Visual Designer that allow you to control the hardware.

What is Visual Designer?

Visual Designer for Arduino combines world class Proteus VSM simulation with an easy to use flowchart editor and a gallery of virtual hardware to provide a truly integrated and intuitive development environment for Arduino.

The peripheral gallery makes hardware design easy. Simply add a shield or sensor from the gallery and Visual Designer will automatically place the correct circuitry on the Proteus schematic for you and add some simple methods to Visual Designer that allow you to control the hardware.

Simplifying Hardware Design

Hardware in Visual Designer starts with the Peripheral Gallery. This contains dozens of ready-made schematic circuit blocks corresponding to real Arduino™ shields and Grove modules. The user simply selects the peripheral(s) they want from the gallery and Visual Designer then:

• Auto-places the circuitry on the schematic.
• Adds the external peripherals to Visual Designer.
• Provides simple methods that you can drag and drop onto the flowchart to control the hardware.

If an Arduino shield is added then it will automatically be connected to the processor base board. If a Grove sensor is added, it can easily be edited to change the socket ID to correspond with your real hardware. In either case Visual Designer will check to make sure that pins are not used by more than one shield or sensor.

Users can also use the professional schematic capture module as a virtual breadboard and make use of over 10,000 simulation modules to design their own hardware. In this case, the wiring would need to need to be made manually and the CPU methods in Visual Designer would be used in the flowchart program.

Simplifying Software Design

The Visual Designer Environment is designed to simplify the task of creating a working program. It does this by providing high level access to a whole range of embedded peripherals, guiding and validating expression entry and replacing a programming language with an easily created flowchart.

Visual Designer

Standard Approach

Simulation

The most exciting and important feature of Proteus VSM is its ability to simulate the interaction between software running on a microcontroller and any analogue or digital electronics connected to it. The micro-controller model sits on the schematic along with the other elements of your product design. It simulates the execution of your object code (machine code), just like a real chip. If the program code writes to a port, the logic levels in circuit change accordingly, and if the circuit changes the state of the processor's pins, this will be seen by your program code, just as in real life.

The VSM CPU models fully simulate I/O ports, interrupts, timers, USARTs and all other peripherals present on each supported processor. It is anything but a simple software simulator since the interaction of all these peripherals with the external circuit is fully modelled down to waveform level and the entire system is therefore simulated.

With over 750 supported micro-processor variants, many thousands of embedded SPICE models and one the worlds largest libraries of embedded simulation peripherals, Proteus VSM remains the first choice for embedded simulation.

Measurement and Analysis

Proteus VSM includes a number of virtual instruments including an Oscilloscope, Logic Analyser, Function Generator, Pattern Generator, Counter Timer and Virtual Terminal as well as simple voltmeters and ammeters. In addition, we provide dedicated Master/Slave/Monitor mode protocol analysers for SPI and I2C - simply wire them onto the serial lines and monitor or interact with the data live during simulation. A truly invaluable (and inexpensive!) way to get your communication software right prior to hardware prototyping.

Should you wish to take detailed measurements on graphs, or perform other analysis types such as frequency, distortion, noise or sweep analyses of analogue circuits, you can purchase the Advanced Simulation Option. This option also includes Conformance Analysis - a unique and powerful tool for Software Quality Assurance.

Debugging

Whilst Proteus VSM is already unique in its capability to run near real time simulations of complete micro-controller systems, its real power comes from its ability to perform these simulations in single step mode. This works just like your favourite software debugger, except that as you single step the code, you can observe the effect on the entire design - including all the electronics external to the microcontroller.

In addition to traditional debugging where you set one or breakpoints in your source and then step the code when they are triggered, Proteus allows you to set breakpoints on the schematic so that a hardware condition can trigger a breakpoint. If a problem is identifiable as a hardware fault, then using hardware breakpoints will pause the simulation whenever the fault condition occurs. For example, if malformed characters were appearing on the LCD display setting a hardware breakpoint on the busy line would be a good place to start investigating.

The other major tool at your disposal for single step debugging is the watch window. This allows register and/or address monitoring and also allows you to add variables from the variables window for inspection. You can set breakpoints on a logical condition of any item added to the watch window making it easy for example to trap a timer overflow.

Diagnostics

Proteus is equipped with comprehensive diagnostic or trace messaging. This allows you to specify which components or processor peripherals that are of interest at any given time and receive detailed textual reporting of all activity and system interaction. You can specify which on-board peripherals of the MCU that you want to monitor (e.g. SPI, VIC) and also monitor external peripherals such as memory devices, LCD displays or brushless motors.

This ability to monitor both sides of communications is invaluable as a debugging aid, allowing you to locate and fix problems in both software and hardware much faster than you could when working on a physical prototype.

The VSM Advantage

The Proteus Design Suite is wholly unique in offering the ability to co-simulate both high and low-level micro-controller code in the context of a mixed-mode SPICE circuit simulation. With this Virtual System Modelling facility, you can truly use agile development philosophy in embedded engineering projects, reaping huge rewards in terms of reduced time to market and lower costs of development.

If one person designs both the hardware and the software then that person benefits as the hardware design may be changed just as easily (and at the same time) as the software design. In larger organisations where the two roles are separated, the software designers can begin work as soon as the schematic is completed; there is no need for them to wait until a physical prototype exists.

In short, Proteus VSM improves efficiency, quality and flexibility throughout the design process...