Visually programmable (schematic like) proto board with ARM micro

[chmod775]

Hello guys!
Lately I've been busy working on this new project: https://hackaday.io/project/19180-focus
It's called FOCUS, and it's a protyping board fully programmable via a visual language, that take's inspiration from electric schematics.
For example:
It will fully support all the TLL 74 family, and you'll be able to program a basic project via just dragging your favourite TLL chips, compiling and and running directly on the board!

Let me know what you think about the project! I'll really appreciate it

[Rerouter]

My first thought would be, are you approaching it as a syncronous linear system, e.g. just compute 1 cycle, then update everything at once, or a pre-computed state tree? e.g. you check each input, match it to a mask and then update all states from that mask.

Curious how salable your logic processing is.

[donotdespisethesnake]

I think this sort of thing is fairly pointless, who is the target audience? People who can design something with discrete logic will have no problem doing the same thing in C. Simulating hardware in software is always going to be horribly inefficient. Beginners to electronics and MCUs are not going to know discrete logic.

OTOH, if the output was VHDL which ran in an FPGA, I think that would be really useful. I would even pay for it!

[Rerouter]

One target audience is people that are trained in PLC programming, but not verbose programming, most of them only know ladder logic and function block style programming.

[donotdespisethesnake]

One target audience is people that are trained in PLC programming, but not verbose programming, most of them only know ladder logic and function block style programming.

Sure, but I think there are already many tools to do visual ladder logic in software? Maybe they are expensive. That usually indicates a niche market.

[hexreader]

I don't see how an ARM chip can ever come anywhere close to replicating logic gates, except for trivial applications

I would have thought that an FPGA would be essential to do this job in any sensible way

.... but maybe I just don't understand?

Replace the ARM with an FPGA and I will be very interested.

[chmod775]

Thanks for replying guys!

The hardware developed in the IDE it's not simulated on the device, but instead, it's entirely 'compiled' in C++ (with a small framework and a specific template for the board (like Write / Read classes for GPIO)) and then sent to an ARM g++ compiler.

The advantage here it's that the user can create new custom blocks using real programming languages (in this case C++) to access the device!
Even re-using already written code online.
( For ex. using the SPI or UART, LCD / OLED, Servos, etc... )

It's not focus-ed (sorry for the joke ) on running just GATES logic.
The gate's one was a simple example ( I'll post more advanced one's shortly, promised; Stay tuned! )

By the way, at the moment, I've used what was a cheap and easy to program / 'ready-to-go' solution (specifically an LPC microcontroller with built-in USB MSD bootloader).

The IDE can easily support other compilers too and, one in which I'm veeeery interested, is also VHDL for FPGAs.

[chmod775]

Yep, correct, it's cycle based!

To be fair, the inspiration come's directly from the Industry sector. Where there is the prevalence of PLCs programmed via Ladder logic (My actual work it's related on developing automation software).

But PLCs and Automation are rough sectors. It's almost impossible to target them