Flowchart-like simulation for programming microcontrollers (Statemate)

[Pim]

I have the desire to design and dry-run programs mainly for AVR ATTiny and comparable PIC microcontrollers. I intend to do this by from my initial idea make an old-fashion flowchart and follow it trough to see that the program as such will produce the intended result. But humans do mistakes, so me too. There are flowchart softwares around and my idea is to use such and simulate a "dry-run" of the program with any flowchart program which has some intelligence built-in.

Very handy is the ability to download trial versions of different programs for evaluation. I know of MATLAB having such possibility (stateflow), also visualstate and both can be evaluated by trials or at an university. But then I also know of a program called Statemate, which was sold by I-Logix a long time ago and now is named IBM Rational Statemate. Unfortunately they do not offer any trial downloads for evaluation. The versions I have seen floating around on the Internet have been very old ones (I-Logix Statemate 4) and which essentially are UNIX programs ported to Windows requiring Windows to have some type of X-server and not whichever either but only the one from MKS. The MKS X-windows server that is for the older versions of Statemate is incompatible with Windows 2003 Server.

I would want to try any version of this Statemate on my Windows 2003 Server computer and have thus two questions: 1) Would Statemate be a promiseable solution to my problem? 2) How on earth would it be possible to evaluate this program? IBM doesn't deal with smaller companies or students. And if having been a student with a good experience of a program you (of course) want the boss to buy it for the company you are working for in the future. I would be thankful for any advises to my problem.

/Pim

 

[ckshivaram]

this concept is also seen in the products of lego mindstrom who make 8 bit and 32 bit controller based robotics.. i bought this 6 years ago... this allows the user to drag and drop the flow chart symbols and enter the values and compile them... it generates the executable for you... but making this a generic tools for all controllers is difficult as the architecture is different...

other than this for PIC you have **broken link removed**
and for 8051 you have Welcome to the Matrix Multimedia homepage

there are already in market, what new you will do in this??????????

 

[Pim]

I am not primarily after getting ready code just to burn the microcontroller with. I am more into evaluating some design ideas or algorithms or the like with this kind of smart flowchart program. It is essentially to think as designing a microcontroller program with LEGO, you can move around different symbols of the flowchart and se what-if. And all results calculated by a computer rather than by man so no human errors are involved. When you end up with a flowchart with some higher type of code (or block code) you just translate what there might be into C or assembly language. It's the thought-of-trial-and-error playing with a flowchart that I am after, if I can express my desire clear enough.

PICAXE I didn't know of before. Is it good?...and no less important - is it possible to evaluate? Primarily I am more interested in ATTiny, but PIC is also of interest.
Regarding the link for 8051 - its a CPU that is more capable and larger than the small microcontrollers that I am most interest in. Do you think that the 8051-link is worth putting a considerable amount of time trying? I have as a goal to invest quite some time with only a few suitable programs that indeed look promising for my purpose so as test them to their limits. If successful, any of them will be my worktools and the seller of these programs will surely be satisfied (as my future boss). But as said before - Statemate is the one that I really want to evaluate at the moment. Having been reading what there is to read about it, but nonetheless - still no way that I have found to evaluate it. It would do for my part with an older version too (I-Logix Statemate 4.1 for example), which I will have to test on an older computer, but anyway...where to get Statemate for evaluation??? Also interested in other peoples views of its purposefulness for my intended usage

/Pim

 

[ckshivaram]

what i said about lego mindstrom has been proved in safety critical application where they design these robots( though it is used for (children learning and entertainment fun), the same model has been used for many industrial applications too.. this also has RTOS so the timing and the output should be dependable.... they work with hitachi 8 and 32 bit processors.

even the tool for 8051 has been proved that they have excatly the same behavior wich is got by coding them in C or asm language..
But i am not aware of PIC tool, as i have not used it, but learnt about its existance through some thread in forum...

 

[Siddharthsharma.mw]

To try out new design ideas, I can see that you are leaning towards simulation only solutions for a start. Check out Stateflow as it provides state machine animation so you can see how the logic behaves during simulation. Check out the licensing options for commercial/students on the Stateflow main page.

adding to what ckshivaram is saying, Simulink (from the makers of MATLAB) have added support for directly targeting hardware (Lego etc.) in their latest release R2012b. So you basically create the design in MATLAB/Simulink/Stateflow and generate code to run on the target hardware. See more information here:
**broken link removed**

 

[ALERTLINKS]

Flowcode is a complete solution for pic, avr and arm microcontroller. Has improved a lot during years of development.
http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/flowcode.php