On 4/18/07, Günter Dannoritzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Timothy Normand Miller wrote:
>
> What I want is a simple computer-aided design tool that's specialized
> for creating wave forms. The things I need involve indicating what
> signals are (one-bit, clock, multi-bit, etc.), what their values are
> at any given time, and then, importantly, a way to indicate their
> dependencies.
>
> Look at the docs on fifos, and you'll see what I mean. The way the
> interface works is efficient but not perfectly intuitive. I often end
> up hand-drawing a timing diagram so I can make sure that I'm
> generating the right signals at the right times.
>
Did you look at the sample scripts of drawtiming:
http://drawtiming.sourceforge.net/samples.html
I think it is pretty intuitive and might get you going faster than
creating a GUI application with a clickable canvas.
I did look at that, and it seems to me that it would be really great
for documenting waveforms. But I want to use this primarily as a
/design/ tool, where I want to drag things around in the diagram,
changing timings and such. The organization imposed by this tool is
per-clock. I tend to think more per-signal, then per-clock for that
signal. Then I want to overlay dependencies between signals.
On the one hand, it has occurred to me that maybe I'm the only one who
thinks this way, which explains why no one else has designed a tool
that organizes things this way. But on the other hand, I'm not that
special or different, so I expect lots of electrical engineers would
love a tool like this, but they're not enough into developing software
to have written one already. Plus, most waveforms people deal with
are outputs from simulation tools, and that's a totally solve problem
in the form of things like gtkWave and other such things.
Actually, if you want to see how a hardware engineer things, look at
Howard. He has, I don't know, something like 15 to 20 years more chip
design experience than I have, maybe more. When he's working on
timing diagrams, he nicks an A3 (or tabloid or whatever) out of the
printer and draws diagrams on it with a pencil. Aside from the fact
that there's are tactile and freeform aspects to using pencil and
paper that would be lost, I bet he'd be all over this sort of thing.
--
Timothy Normand Miller
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti
Open Graphics Project
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