Written by: Administrator
Parent Category: Projects
Category: BlinkenBone - How to connect a console panel

SimH

The only purpose of the whole BlinkenBone project is to let console panels behave as if they still were connected to their original machines.

So you have eagerly waited to plug the SimH simulator onto the panel.

To be able to control the panel, a Blinkenlight API client must be incorporated into SimH. This client module appears as a SimH machine  device with the name "REALCONS".

Read here all about it!

Folowing are just a few hints ... mostly bugs and inconveniences :-)

Getting SimH with REALCONS extension

Well, contact me!

I forked a special SimH version out of the C sources, version is still 3.8.x.

I'm not putting it online, because its still under development.

I can generate version for BeagleBone ARM7 Linux,  for x86 Linux and for MS-Windows.

 

Selecting the right CPU type

In SimH you set the CPU model of the PDP-11 with
    set cpu <type>,
with type = "11/05", "11/70", "11/40", "11/23", and so on.

Normally this setting gets not too much attention:

For the REALCONS extension, the cpu type is a very important setting:

Which panels are supported by the current SimH version?

At the moment, SimH/REALCONS supports 11/40 and 11/70.
There's no way to query it directly, maybe this is a TODO for me.

To support a new cpu type, both REALCONS and the panel must be build for it.

 

Trimming the update rate

To update the lamps on the panel, and to poll the switch state, there is periodically a data transimssion between SimH and the Blinkenlight API server.

REALCONS updates the panel asynchronically from the SimH simulation loop, you can choose an arbitrary update rate.

You can experiment with

sim>set realcons interval=<update_in_milli_seconds>with <update_in_millisconds> optimally in the range of 100..1. "1" means: 1000 updates per second, "100 means" : 10 updates per seconds.

This is far far more slower than on a real PDP-11: there the display is update with the CPU clock, which is about 1 MHz.

These factors have influence the optimal update rate

I usually have interval times of 2..7 milliseconds. REALCONS defaults to 20 milliseconds.