Bela simulator/emulator/VM possible?

zeyus

Hey all, I'm just about to start on an academic project that uses multiple Belas, these have to stay at the university (for now) and I want to start preparing the code part. I usually use VSCode as my IDE for development.

My question is: Is it possible to emulate the hardware in some way in order to do some "offline" development for testing and debugging?

I tried searching the forums and docs and haven't found anything, but it seems like a useful feature to have to make sure the code will run and compile. It doesn't have to connect to real I/O, but dummy data would be fine (e.g. sine waves or intermittent pulses, etc).

Thanks 🙂

giuliomoro

hmm we don't have anything like that right now.

I just made a quick branch that would build on macos* and run a basic program, however you won't have any audio I/O (it only works in --board=Batch mode). If you had any time to pour into this, it shouldn't take too long to read from soundfile and render to soundfile, or that uses portaudio or RtAudio for a cross-platform live audio backend. Unfortunately we are unable to put time to get this to work, but we would be happy to assist you if you have the expertise and the time to put in.

* some functionalities have been removed (e.g.: all mq_ stuff has been removed as it doesn't exist on macos, but this shouldn't affect normal functioning) and some other things (e.g.: Scope, Gui) won't work because it requires some replacement for its Xenomai backend.

giuliomoro

ah I should add that this

(it only works in --board=Batch mode).

means you could easily add some audio playback/recording facilities within the user program. For instance, filling in the context->audioIn member with the data from a pre-loaded audio sample and then use the recording facilities of examples//Audio/record-audio/ to record the output to disk.

giuliomoro

and also add that so much of Bela programming is interacting with analog / digital inputs so that using pre-recorded files as inputs may not always fit the bill.

giuliomoro

And you'll have to keep in mind that the type of processing that you'll be able to fit on a desktop/notebook CPU is going to be significantly larger than the one you'll be able to do on Bela, so ... manage your expectations!

zeyus

Hey thanks for this, I've managed to get a hold of a bela mini to do the dev work on. I still think it might be useful to have a pipeline or VM setup possible, but I can also see how it would be a lot of hassle for a very edge case. Unfortunately I'm running on windows (or WSL2) but I'm guessing the OSX branch might work on WSL with some modifications?

Anyway, I'm getting the hang of it bit by bit, still struggling with using the IDE vs VSCode (especially missing co-pilot haha, it's become a crutch), and I have a C++ question, but I'll post it in a new thread.

giuliomoro

zeyus Unfortunately I'm running on windows (or WSL2) but I'm guessing the OSX branch might work on WSL with some modifications?

you probably need even fewer changes, as I expect WSL2 to provide the mq_ functions, which macos doesn't.

zeyus struggling with using the IDE vs VSCode (especially missing co-pilot haha, it's become a crutch),

there are options to use VSCode and Bela, with or without a cross-compiling setup, see https://forum.bela.io/?q=vscode