Kent, On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 10:12 PM, Kent A. Reed <knbr...@erols.com> wrote: > 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 > nice work i tried same in gEDA some things for thought
user may want to hilight a signal and see where it goes schematics may get quite large and need 'sheets' ( sub-schematics ), this necessitates 'off-schema signals' ( like 'continued on page 12a') hal files may be hierarchical or sequential in the ini ( like includes or multiply sequential entries ) the ability to move elements would be tricky in html, so a 'frozen' schematic may be a difficulty/expectation for some the library of elements (widgets/comps ) needs an editor bi-direction... the ability to start with text or graphs and create the other the ability to attach to threads ( micges & i created thread widgets with prioritized pins ) the setting of constants your work with graphviz/dotty is nice, thanks! regards TomP ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
