Suggested improvement(s) for simulation

Hi. I do not own a Roboteq controller (yet), but am helping a friend in England with scripting of his hdc2450 for a wheelchair that he\'s building. I do have an ulterior motive for helping him: assuming his testing of the Roboteq is successful, I intend to use one for my daughter\'s next chair.

As I don\'t have a controller, I can only use the simulator to test my code, and it has some unfortunate limitations.

(1) According to the manual

The four Timers operate differently in the simulator

As far as I can tell, however, the timers (at least timer 1) don\'t function at all in the simulator. Hence, for example, if I want to call a particular subroutine only once every 500 msec, I have no way to tell whether my timer coding works or not.

(2) Again, according to the manual,

Controller configurations and operating parameters are not accessible from the simulator
• Controller commands cannot be sent from the simulator

While for many things, reading values from the keyboard is an adequate method for preliminary testing. For other things, such as GetInput (_VAR, 1) and SetCommand (_VAR, 1, nnnn) it would certainly be helpful if the simulator could set aside some memory that simulates the flash memory of the controller. Again, an example. I want to accumulate current consumption measured at 1 second intervals and store that so that if the controller has been shut off, the previously stored value can be retrieved at startup to continue the cumulative estimate of consumption. I have no way of simulating this. Of course, if PC memory were set aside to mimic a few bytes of flash, it could just as well be set aside to mimic most or all of what\'s stored in non-volatile memory. If that were done, one could simulate reading configuration and operating parameters and sending controller commands (not so much in my case for motor commands, but for digital output commands).

So my suggestions are two, implement a simulation of the count-down timers, and use some PC RAM to allow simulation of the controller\'s flash memory.

Ciao,
Lenny (in Siena, Italy)