Dave McGuire wrote:
On Mar 15, 2010, at 12:32 AM, Dan McMahill wrote:IMHO, there are already very mature open source data plotters out there. Think gnuplot, or grace. What is the rationale in rolling your own?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_improvementsunless 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.Good heavens. That's the sort of stuff I do with a digitizing oscilloscope. I could never imagine doing that with simulator output.
I think your 2nd sentence hits the nail on the head. Simulator output can be for 2 things.
1) presentation like in a design review or a paper. When you get here, you're supposed to be "done"
2) this one is where the majority of the time is typically spent. debugging! Is the circuit hooked up right? Is it performing right? Why isn't it working right, why isn't it performing at the level you want. So think of the simulator and waveform viewer as a scope and a spectrum and network analyzer. The interactivity needs to be as easy in a waveform tool as it is in a scope. Since you have the disadvantages of model inaccuracies and simulation time being much longer than real time you want to further disadvantage yourself and you should take advantage of the zero-capacitance voltage probes, ideal current probes, gnucaps ability to access internals like diode junction current versus the charging current, etc.
so why not do this with simulator output? -Dan _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user