Gentle persons: You've kindly put up with me bloviating on all manner of subjects for some years now. I owe you a more direct contribution.
Despite the fact that I'm a lexical kind of guy who believes in the Tao of Unix (everything should be text that can be piped through filters / yada yada yada), I've often thought it would be nice to be able to gen up visualizations of EMC2 configurations easily and quickly. Like most (perhaps all?) my thoughts, this one is not original to me. For example, back in 2008 Kirk Wallace wrote to this list "[i]t would be nice to have a way to diagram existing HAL files." Later the same year, Jon Elson mentioned in regard to a configuration involving his PPMC "[s]omeday, I probably need to make a 'wiring' diagram of the hal signals and pins." In response to Kirk, John Kasunich wrote "The problem with any HAL to schematic (or netlist to schematic) program is that it will most likely generate hideous schematics. When a circuit designer draws a schematic, he knows what the circuit does. He lays out the circuit on the page to clearly convey that information. "A program that is reading a circuit netlist or a HAL file has no idea what the circuit does, so all it can do is plop things down at random and draw lines between them. The result might be easier to understand than the original file, but I wouldn't count on it. It will almost certainly need radically rearranged to make it clear and easy to understand." John was absolutely right but but recently I've been intrigued by the thought that "[t]he result might be easier to understand than the original file...." I have spent some of my copious free time (which is actually almost no time for reasons I won't go into here) seeing how far I had to go to create easier-to-understand visualizations of EMC2 configurations. I'm not done but I figured I should show my hand. You can see what I'm up to at https://sites.google.com/site/manisbutareed (I apologize for the small-ish images. As soon as I figure out how to implement "click to enlarge" on a Google site, I'll do it.) I expect some will accept nothing less than Manhattan routing (e.g., diagrams laid out like a street map of mid-town Manhattan) and I can't scratch their itch (although I've got an inkling of an idea). For those who can live with the (sometimes not so) "aesthetic" routing produced by the Graphviz software package I've been experimenting with, I have a request. I'd like to test my experimental hal2html script against potentially 'killer' configurations to see if I can break it and all I've got are the examples in the EMC2 distribution. If you have a particularly gnarly configuration running in EMC2, would you consider saving it from halcmd using the "save neta <filename>" command, dropping the resulting file somewhere accessible to me, and notifying me via email? If my script can process it successfully, you'll get the results; if it can't, I'll get an idea of what I need to do next. Thanks in advance. Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-oct _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
