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_improvementsIMHO, 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 _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user