Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:34:17 +0100, Arnaud Gardelein wrote:
With the help of Ivan I'm writing a viewer, oscopy
(http://repo.or.cz/w/oscopy.git) based draft #4 of this page:
http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:data_plotting_improvements
IMHO, there are already very mature open source data plotters out there.
Think gnuplot, or grace. What is the rationale in rolling your own?
unless I'm missing some key feature of gnuplot and grace, they stink for
plotting simulator output.
I spend a *lot* of time looking at simulator output and some of the
things which are used over and over again are easy interactive zoom
in/out, panning at a fixed zoom, putting cursors on waveforms that will
lock onto the actual datapoints, having delta cursors, and having a
flexible and *extensible* waveform calculator. The types of
postprocessing range from the very simple (out_plus - out-minus) to more
complex but standard like an fft to fairly complex custom functions.
My experience with things like gnuplot, matlab, octave (which uses
gnuplot), scilab, grace, etc. is that they are no where nearly as
interactive as you'd really like for efficiently processing and
interacting with simulator data.
Also, I'm not sure if any of these plotting tools provide some of the
other important features like the ability to define custom grid lines
(think Smith chart, Nichols chart, and I have at least one that as far
as I know only I use). Another important feature in a general purpose
simulation waveform viewer is to be able to define custom cursor readout
transformations. Again, a good example is a Smith chart. You might
like to have the cursor readout tell you reflection coefficient but you
might prefer normalized impedance, or perhaps resistance plus
inductance/capacitance, etc.
I've seen commercial tools that have some predefined grids like
rectangular, polar, smith but so far none have taken it to the next
level of letting you add custom ones or the custom readout.
So.... I'd say that especially in the opensource area, a good waveform
viewer is not reinventing the wheel. It is time to make a round one
instead of the existing square ones!
-Dan
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