Does anyone make a DECENT timing diagram editor? I don't need any timing analysis, just some pretty graphics to help get some information across to some techs that do not speak English very well, and I'm sure the data will be needed for a manual as well. The timings are in milliseconds, not ns and my googling has led to some pretty expensive dead ends.
"Timing Diagrams" suggests to me very simple line graphics that many programs could produce. You do not say for what environment/OS, but these few would cover DOS/Windows/Unices: Visio, the built-in graphics in MS-Word, Dia, the Gimp, OpenOffice's Draw, Karbon14, Skencil, QCad, Xfig, and any low end 2D CAD program. (You can probably find old DOS CAD software for less than $10, old versions of Autosketch, TurboCad, etc.)
If you do not need any "timing analysis" (whatever that means,) what are the requirement for timing diagram editor?
Roberto Waltman.
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As you have probably noticed, it's not cheap. But it does meet your requirement of being decent. You say you don't need timing analysis. If that is true then you can just use your favourite vector graphics editor. You don't need a timing diagram editor per se. I would use Visio. Others have made equally good suggestions.
However, you are probably going to want some kind of automation, whereby you can change some numbers and the picture changes automatically. In that case Timing Designer is probably your best bet.
I have duplicate X values in the first column to provide nice edge transitions. The first x of a pair gets the value before the transition, the second the value after.
(Note: in cases where no values change, you don't need duplicate lines, but this was easier to type in on short notice...)
Paste this into excel (or any spreadsheet with graphics, I imagine), select the area and graph it, and you'll see what it looks like (I don't want to html this response to show you). Then you can customize your graph how you like it.
You can even put formulas in and watch it change dynamically.
I even had a way to even scroll the timing waveform at one point, but that's not at my fingertips at the moment.
It is pretty simple line drawings, BUT it has to a little more than draw lines and such. The ability to specify exact positions on a timeline is just about a must, or you spend hours doing manual editing of edges and text. It is possible, but there are easier ways to do it and time is money. The "timing analysis" part is pretty obvious if you have done a look at what commercial products are out there.
Yes, I was looking for a little more automation that just drawing, basically, by hand. I have pretty much dug through everything that looked promising during my Google search and, just like the "Timing Designer from Chronology", I would be paying a load of cash for features I just don't need.
Most vector drawing packages can do this. Of course spending time on editing lines is hardly productive. There are quite a few packages that has scripting support built in. Using this should allow you to fairly easily provide dynamic lines, which you can specify using a simple script. Using this approach gnuplot is a possibility.
I wonder if (just thinking aloud) a Project Management / Critical Path Method, etc. program could be coerced into producing this kind of drawings? (Or produce some kind of output that could be converted into drawings?) They deal with the same type of constraints: "This action lasts at least such and such time", "This event must happen before that", "That event happens at time X" and so on.
Roberto Waltman.
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Well, I had to actually try to get some work done on these diagrams today, and I still didn't find anything that looked decent. So, I broke down and used my CAD package to just sledge hammer some stuff together. It wasn't too bad using a fixed step rate to be equal to a fixed period of time. The only nice thing is that most of the information I need to convey can be presented on a 1000ms timeline with 2ms resolution. I just made a template and went to work.
Timing Tool is pretty cool. I use it from time to time. It's a java applet so you use it online. It's really well done and free for the 'lite' version.
On the other hand, for purposes of training, Excel has all the annotation tools as well for presentation of the graphs.
So you can drag and drop call out balloons and line art to embellish the graph to your liking, which would be a lot more work if done programmatically.
It all boils down to how much you have to do and how often and tools you are used to.
I actually downloaded the trial version of this one HOPING it would do what I wanted, but for some reason (now forgotten). I didn't like it/had a problem with it/it didn't do everything I needed. You know......
There was a discussion about this a month or so ago. One cheap and easy way is to use a font that contains all the necessary elements used in timing diagrams, and then simply use a text editor to generate the diagrams.
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