frequently-asked-questions
What is the history behind the name Mock Turtle?
At the beginning this project was named White Rabbit Node Core; we quickly noticed that there was nothing related to White Rabbit in this project so we rename it to Mock Turtle. As for White Rabbit, this name comes from a character in "Alice In Wonderland". People may think that code execution on this system is slow like a turtle, because it runs on an FPGA based soft-CPU with limited resources. Actually this is not true: mock*; the strong point of this project is the high determinism which make it a very good candidate for real-time tasks.
When I should use Mock Turtle?
The need for this framework comes from the fact that in some contexts the development of a gateware core is more complex than writing a software application. Software takes more computation time than a custom-designed gateware core; but on the other hand, the development and support efforts are significantly reduced. Mock Turtle is a solution for such problems. The gateware core complexity is moved to the software domain within the Mock Turtle boundaries, without sacrificing determinism.
When I should not use Mock Turtle?
Mock Turtle has limited computation power, this precludes some high
performances applications like DSP.
If you really want to use Mock Turtle for DSP analysis (or other high
performances applications), please consider the development of a
dedicated HDL core to perform the DSP analysis and to use Mock Turtle as
a control system for the DSP core.
Which cards/FPGAs can it be used on?
Any FPGA is good, this is not limited to any particular brand or model.