Emulator for STM32H745

[ATank.1]

Hello,

We are using a hardware with STM32H745 controller with FreeRTOS.

Can you please suggest a good PC Emulator which can be used to emulate above controller with FreeRTOS.

Also we use UART, SPI, LED, CAN peripherals on the actual hardware. Can these peripherals be emulated?

Some options I looked at are QEMU and Renode but not sure about STM32745H7 support or FreeRTOS support.

Thanks & Regards,

Anuj

[Peter BENSCH · Accepted solution]

The hardware structure of the STM32, especially the Cortex-M7 based STM32F7 and STM32H7 is so complex that an emulator or simulator would be much too expensive. In this respect, the answer is: no, there is (currently) no emulator or simulator .

However, there are universal evaluation boards called NUCLEO with which you could test all of them live.

Regards
/Peter

[Andrew Neil]

As @Peter BENSCH said, emulators haven't been viable for decades now.

Instead, microcontrollers have debug built-in - accessible via JTAG or SWD.

So you can use actual target hardware, while getting all the internal access that Emulators used to give.

To examine FreeRTOS features which are independent of the target hardware, there's a Windows simulator:

https://www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS-simulator-for-Windows.html

[ATank.1]

Hi 

Thanks for the super quick reply:)

Do you mean to say there no ready made emulator /simulator or STM32H745? 

Few options I checked QEMU, Renode, Proteus. Your thoughts on the same?

Also If I want to simulate only the software with RTOS and not the hardware then are there any good options?

Thanks & Regards,

Anuj

[Andrew Neil]

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@ATank.1 wrote:

Do you mean to say there no ready made emulator /simulator or STM32H745? 

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Yes.

With on-chip debug and low-cost boards like Nucleo, there's really no call for it nowadays.

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@ATank.1 wrote:

 If I want to simulate only the software with RTOS and not the hardware then are there any good options?

---

See the Windows simulator link, above.

[ATank.1]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply.

For hardware emulation there are options such as Renode and QEMU which support some STM32 devices.

Renode supports STM32H743 which I think can be extended to add support for STM32H745 controller.

Is Renode a good option for emulation. Any inputs will really help

Thanks & Regards,

Anuj

[Andrew Neil]

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@ATank.1 wrote:

Is Renode a good option for emulation. Any inputs will really help

---

Before considering that question, why do you think that emulation is a good option at all ?

What are your specific drivers for wanting emulation - rather than, as suggested, using real hardware?

[Nathan_Xi]

Hello,

Simulation is considered as a complex debugging method. I guess that you are not familiar with ICPs, which really save a lot of time by real-time debugging with the help of IDEs. If a single NUCLEO board with an embedded ICP cannot satisfy your development, I suggest you should take a look at the evaluation boards ending with "-EVAL". These are comprehensive hardware solution supporters. Since there's actually no software simulators (as far as I could see, such complex forms would take years to build), purchasing a demo board can save so much misery and expense. Time is pushing everyone forward. Wasting time to find a "satisfying simulator" is not worth doing.

Hope you can be less persistent on simulators, haha.