Is proteus a good choice for MCU work?

[UroBoros]

I am trying to use Proteus for MCU simulation.

Even though I heard a lot of good news about this tool, I find it very problematic and buggy. I would like to know weather this tool can do MCU and analog simulation well? That means, is my problems are because of my inexperience in this tool?

I tried to test a circuit with PIC which drives a serial in parallel out IC to drive some 7 segment displays. The results are not consistent. LED blinks and such mechanisms are ok, but when I enable interrupts and all something is not ok.

Also I tried to test a SPI communication between two PICs. That also is behaving differently even on different sessions.

May be my mistakes, but I would like to know this type of programs can be tested in this and the problems are because of my lack of familiarity with this tool. Otherwise no point in playing with this. I can switch back to my hardware debugger mechanism.

Thanks

 

[nandhu015]

Simulation needs lot of system resources. Blink of 7segment led's may be due to insufficient system resources like processor speed and free ram.

As far as i know it is a good one

 

[Tahmid]

Hi,

I've done these and Proteus does this amazingly accurately. It's either you set up something wrong, or it's because of insufficient hardware, esp processor or RAM. RAM may not be much of a problem provided you have enough, but processor is, since Proteus is a single-threaded app (it's biggest disadvantage), even if you have a quad-core CPU, unless it's smart enough to do something like TurboCore in AMD or TurboBoost in Intel, you're just going to use that one thread, rendering the other 3 useless and putting a whole lot of load on the single thread. But if you have something like a Celeron or even a P4, your simulations will be way off track for medium-to-complex circuits, as a huge CPU load is put.
So far, I find Proteus is the best simulation software in microcontrollers, or for the matter, in analogue and digital as well.

Hope this helps.
Tahmid.

---------- Post added at 18:22 ---------- Previous post was at 18:19 ----------

The other thing is it follows your timestep, eg. if you have a source of 25kHz frequency, it's gonna try to reduce the timestep to such a value so that 25kHz can be easily simulated and understood by the user. Maybe you refresh your 7-segments at such a rate, that you can see the LEDs changing position. Just increase the frequency in this case to around 1kHz refresh rate and you'll see it smooth. But in real life 100Hz will be smooth as your eyes won't react to such vibrations, but Proteus will slow itself down intentionally to let you see this.

Hope this helps.
Tahmid.

 

[sanjubluerock3]

Proteus is quiet good ....why don't you try real pic simulator...