What is a good tool for graphically displaying submillisecond timelines?

Question

I am trying to create a timeline for my inline code in real time. I need to show all the interrupts, what triggers them, when they are serviced, how long they run, etc. I did the profiling and got the raw data, now I need a way to show the graph on a graph, scale.

I was looking for a good tool, but haven’t come up with anything good yet. Everything that I found works according to the terms of days and years. I want the graph to show one 2 millisecond cycle. While I'm using Visio, but I keep thinking that something should be easier. Any ideas?

I hope to create something like this: .
Unfortunately, mine is harder, but what's the general idea.

Answer 1

Thus, on this scale, your abscissas will be a pure number (for example, microseconds from the moment you started, or some of them). Graphical tools to graphically display such things are commonplace.

I would suggest something like gnuplot , but I suspect that the problem is bigger than the summary shows.

Ah, the picture makes everything a lot clearer. If gnuplot does not do this for you, I offer another suggestion (or at least tell you what I will do): write it from scratch.

In particular, I would probably compile something in a scripting language (ruby, python, whatever) to read the data and generate pic code that looked the way I wanted. If you decide to go this route, an overview of the basics of pic , as well as a guide . If you dig, you should have something believable in an hour, and within a week you will have something that suits you better than any GUI application that will ever be on the shelf.

Answer 2

I feel for you. In my system, we have a 1.1 millisecond cycle and 13 measurement points over four different components. I suspect you are facing similar complexity.

The bad news is that there are no ready-made solutions that I know of. However, MarkusQ correctly states that you can use standard (graphics packages) to accomplish what you need. But you will need to spend some time to customize the output to your liking.

We make extensive use of the R Project , driven by Python code through the RPy R / Python bridge , to generate our stories. This setup works very well for us and allowed us to automate the process. Python is used to collect and clean data from a real-time system, and R is used to draw.

Support for customizing the R graphic signature is extensive, allowing you to control all aspects of the plot, locations, sizes, etc. This may be intimidating at first, but there is a great R Graphics book that helps a companion website that contains all the sample books .

Whatever you choose, make sure that it is possible to automate using scripts. The amount of data generated by real-time systems is too much to handle without flexible tools.

Answer 3

gtkwave can be used