Testing in the simulator

Testing a chip in the game is tedious. You cannot simply set a sensor to 5 °C, and if something goes wrong, the room is already cold. The simulator in the IC10 coder plays all of that through in the browser.

Step, tick and breakpoint#

A breakpoint stops the run at a line. You set it with a click on the line number. Then the register list shows exactly what is in every register before that line. With Step you continue from there instruction by instruction. The tick display tells you which line the chip is on and how many of the 128 instructions the tick has used.

Setting values by hand#

Under Devices you create what your chip expects: “Add to network” for lbn and sbn, “Insert device” for a pin. Every device gets a name as in the game and values you can change at any time. That way you try every case: cold, warm, exactly on the limit. Remove takes a device away, that is your failure test.

Strict mode only allows LogicTypes that are listed on the device, as with real devices. That helps you find mistyped names.

Couplings for trends#

A real pump fills a tank. In the simulator a coupling does that: every tick factor × source is added to the target.

On top of that every value has a Δ/tick, a fixed change per tick. −10 on the pressure lets the tank slowly drain. Together you see whether your hysteresis swings the way it should. The chart button next to a register records the curve in the Trend.

sgt edge pumping last     # pump just started?
add starts starts edge    # count switching cycles
move last pumping

How often a pump starts is a good measure. If it switches every few ticks in the trend, your band is too narrow.