Virtual-BreadBoard

VBB is a Virtual Breadboard / PCB simultation for Prototyping and Educational Purposes. It is featured in this journal and was originally in the riscv-vp repository. It is however not limited to risc-v specific hardware and thus was moved. If you are using the Virtual Breadboard GUI in a scientific paper, please cite this journal: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9268/12/4/52.

It features a TCP protocol that connects GPIO-Modules of virtual Processors to this interactive GUI. Devices can be modelled in either C++ or Lua for the speed/flexibility tradeoff.

In this architecture overview, the vp-breadboard is the off-chip simulator, contained in this repo. The bi-directional protocol is specified in a submodule. The riscv-vp is an SoC simulator in one of the available configurations (currently the hifive1 mode). Example software (SW) that runs on the SoC can be found in this repo.

1) HowTo Use

This repo contains some example environments (.json configuration files) and loads an OLED screen with some buttons per default. For a complete list of configuration files and available devices, run vp-breadboard -h.

2) Available Demos

Currently, there is a CLI tool that mocks a GPIO module in lib/protocol/test, and the fully featured riscv-vp in its Sifive HiFive1 target. For building the riscv-vp, please refer to https://github.com/agra-uni-bremen/riscv-vp. Some example programs, such as a snake game, are built around the Sifive Hifive1 board and can be found in this repo: https://github.com/agra-uni-bremen/sifive-hifive1.

3) Build requirements

Mainly the usual build tools (and lua) are required:

On Ubuntu 22, install these:

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake autotools-dev curl libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev libgmp-dev gawk build-essential bison flex texinfo libgoogle-perftools-dev libtool patchutils bc zlib1g-dev libexpat-dev qt5-default liblua5.4-dev 

On Fedora, following actions are required:

sudo dnf groupinstall "C Development Tools and Libraries"
sudo dnf install autoconf automake curl libmpc-devel mpfr-devel gmp-devel gawk bison flex texinfo gperf libtool patchutils bc zlib-devel expat-devel cmake qt5-qtbase qt5-qtbase-devel lua-devel
#optional debuginfo
sudo dnf debuginfo-install boost-iostreams boost-program-options boost-regex bzip2-libs glibc libgcc libicu libstdc++ zlib

Then, just build it in CMake style: mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make.