Description: First of all, excuse me for not posting at the better place: it's not KDE only but I didn't know where to ask for this poll. Moreover, this is just an idea, no code.
I'm an electronic student. I often use EDAs and other electronic related tools ( Matlab beeing one of them ).
What I can see in the free software world are some fine pieces of application, but not working good together. They are also apps trying do do anything, from pic to (ana)logical circuits design.
The idea would be to create a electric signal common server. I thought of it after I discovered the Jack Audio Connection Kit. The thing would be TECK, the Teck Electr(on)ic connection kit.
With TECK, an app just register a wire or a bus to teck server, and any app can then connect to this wire/bus and using it as if it were an internal signal.
This whould be usefull, for instance, in order to make mesure : I output a wire to teck, I plug an osciloscope to this entry, and I can use a full featured osciloscope from a light app : that's less work for the app coders.
An other thing : I make a microcontroler program, I compile it, and I run it into an emulator, which can be connected to a digital simulation software using the pic outputs from TECK. But even further : I upload the program into the pic, which I connect to TECK and then I can use the same digital simulation tool whithout noticing that the signal comes from a real device.
One other usecase : It's possible to make litle "widgets" or apps simulating industries machine at low cost, and connecting a diagram representation of an algorithme to this virtual machine avoid to spend 30k$ to by this, and 5k$ more for an other. Hight scool whould just need somme of them ( to keep a practical feeling ) and save money.
Please, leave a comment of how useful you think it would be, about what point must be taken in mind seriously.
For now, this thing doesn't seem realy hard to implement from the very litle programming skills I have. May be based on DBus ? -> slower than a direct thing ? Here I'm not able to answer.
Sounds like a great idea.
The problem I can see coming from this ( and here you can tell I know nothing about circuit simulation techniques ) is that different areas of circuit simulation will need vastly different samplerates / simulation accuracies. Tiny / high frequency / parasitic signals which might have a massive effect in one simulator might get lost when piped thru another. And, of course it wouldn't be able to run in realtime, so it would need to have some kind of shared control over virtual time. Interesting though.
Well it could possibly run in real time. It would depend on things like the number of samples, data rates, etc. Now if you were planning on being able to use a GPIB type device to capture that kind of data, it might make it easier.
In fact, the point is mainly on connecting slow devices, not hight frequencies studies.
this would be more oriented towards Ktechlab than qucs or spice style apps.
I don't know who all you have talked to (OSS apps wise) but the folks over at;
http://geda.seul.org/tools/geda/index.html
Might be helpful. They may have some helpful ideas or point you to other folks.
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4 Comments
Sounds like a great idea. The problem I can see coming from this ( and here you can tell I know nothing about circuit simulation techniques ) is that different areas of circuit simulation will need vastly different samplerates / simulation accuracies. Tiny / high frequency / parasitic signals which might have a massive effect in one simulator might get lost when piped thru another. And, of course it wouldn't be able to run in realtime, so it would need to have some kind of shared control over virtual time. Interesting though.
Well it could possibly run in real time. It would depend on things like the number of samples, data rates, etc. Now if you were planning on being able to use a GPIB type device to capture that kind of data, it might make it easier.
In fact, the point is mainly on connecting slow devices, not hight frequencies studies. this would be more oriented towards Ktechlab than qucs or spice style apps.
I don't know who all you have talked to (OSS apps wise) but the folks over at; http://geda.seul.org/tools/geda/index.html Might be helpful. They may have some helpful ideas or point you to other folks.