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iSYSTEMTechBlog: Trigger your Trace with any I/O Signal

Do you know how to use any digital or analog signal to trigger your trace?All you need is an iC5000 on-chip debugger with an I/O module!

Connect the signal you like to trigger on to one of the input lines (digital in, analog in) of the I/O module. Configure those lines in winIDEA Hardware/Options/I/O tab.

Next step is to configure an appropriate trace trigger.

• Open the "Analyzer Configuration List".
• Press the "New" "Trace" button.
• Give it desciptive name e.g. "StartTraceOnButtonPress".
• Select the I/O module tab.
• Check the "Trigger".
• Specify the signal to start the trace with.
  • If you use a digital signal, two combinations of digital inputs can be defined - mask 1 and mask 2. The trigger will be generated if either mask1 or mask 2 match. Within a mask, all checked signals must match the high/low configuration.
  • If you use an analog trigger, the trigger is generated if the measured voltage is lower/higher that the specified threshold. 
• To specify the trace content use the "Wizard" button at the bottom or set it manually in the "Trigger" tab.

That's all!

Find further information in iC5000 I/O module.pdf

iSYSTEMTechBlog: How to track an external signal with iC5000's IO Module ?

With iC5000's IO module you can measure digital and analog signals as well as drive them. winIDEA can display these signals in the analyzer so that you can see the signals tracked by the IO module in correlation to your application's program/data trace and also profiler measurements .

The IO module provides:

• one system port
• 8 channels digital in
• 8 channels digital out
• 2 channels analog in
• 2 channels analog out
• power measurement

How do you configure winIDEA for the IO module (IOM) ?

First step is to physically connect the signal to one of the input ports, e.g. digital in port 3. Please make sure not to exceed the specified input and output range of the IOM signal interface. All details to the hardware physics can be found in the IOModule.pdf in the winIDEA documentation directory (in winIDEA menu "Help/Technical Notes").

Next configure the IOM in winIDEA in menu "Hardware/Options/I/O tab". Check the "Show" box in front of the signal you use, e.g. DIN3. You can also specify another name for the signal, e.g. "ButtonPress".

To display a graph of external signals in  profiler's timeline view select "Show AUX".

This will open the AUX window that shows for every external signal a graph plus values. 

In the screenshots the setup for power measurement and its output is also visible.

 

iSYSTEM exhibits on embedded world 2012

iSYSTEM exhibits on embedded world 2012 fair in Nuremberg (2/28/2012 - 3/1/2012).

We will show our customers:

• The new iC5000 I/O module that enhances iSYSTEM debug tools by a mini HIL component that allows you to measure the power consumption of your hardware and track it down to function level!
• iSYSTEM's realtime unit test tool testIDEA that is now available in standard and professional version offering many new features, e.g.
  • Execution of test cases without code instrumentation
  • Generation of new test cases with Excel!
• fitIDEA - iSYSTEM's answer to functional safety standards like e.g. ISO26262

Visit us on the embedded world 2012 exhibition in booth 4-505 in exhibition hall 4 and get informed!

winIDEA 2011 Final Release Build is 9.11.80

Today iSYSTEM released winIDEA 2011 build 9.11.80 as the final release build of winIDEA 2011. The download ist available here .

The major enhancement of winIDEA 2011 is the supertrace - a complete redesign of the analyzer to combine the features of trace, profiler and statistics analysis in one session. With supertrace all analyzers are based on a single trace so that a single run is sufficient to retrieve all relevant data.

winIDEA 2011 also includes the standard version of testIDEA - iSYSTEM's real-time unit test tool that allows creation and execution of unit tests without code instrumentation.

Many extensions to isystem.connect have been included in winIDEA 2011 to optimally assist iC5000 and testIDEA. Remote control of winIDEA (and iC5000) in a mini-HIL environment or in a test scenario can be easily achieved. Testers can run scripts manually and also automatically to verify the embedded application.

For a complete list of all winIDEA 2011 features see Release Notes Overview . The detailed feature description is included in All winIDEA 2011 Release Notes .
Features of testIDEA are described in testIDEA 2011 Release Notes .

With this release winIDEA 2011 feature development is finalized. In the future there will be only hotfix builds for winIDEA 2011.
iSYSTEM already started further development in the new winIDEA 2012 development version.

iSYSTEMTechBlog: Increase your Analyzer's Performance

Are you recording lots of data to get an insight in the real-time workings of your application? Does it slow down the overall performance of your PC?

Then you may consider following:

Analyzer recordings can be very large. The raw compressed recording itself can be several GB large, after decompression and analysis, the temporary data footprint can increase by a factor of 30-100.

Most of this data is kept on disk in the designated temporay folder. If this folder is located on a slow disk, the overall performance suffers.
If you have another disk with better performance available, set the environment variable ISYSTEM_TEMP to a folder on that disk.We also recommend to defragment this disk.

If you are still struggling with performance problems, consider that profiler and coverage analysis are parallelized. So these can take advantage of a multi-core PC to increase the overall processing performance.

We recommend following system configuration:

• 4-8 core CPU
• 8GB or more RAM
• 100GB free space on TEMP drive. The drive should be defragmented.