SW for drafting 'analog' timing diagrams?

Hello All,

Is there a simple share/free tool that allows to draw timing diagrams where some of the wave forms are not digital? For example where some of them are coming off a simple filter such as an RC?

I don't want to buy something fancy here because I'll most likely need it only once, for a publication. I could whip up the logic and filters in SPICE but then the import of its printout into something where I can add markers would be rather kludgy.

Drawing a nice enough e-function by hand isn't a pretty sight either, even if I'd abstain from coffee for two days.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Frank,

That is one option. But when I tried that the last time it resulted in waveforms that were a bit jagged at the edges. Ok for a module spec but not quite for a publication.

In the old days we had DOS programs that could draw really nice timing diagrams. They could plot finite transition times but they'd fail when you wanted to illustrate things such as a capacitive load.

Regards, Joerg

"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:ksZuf.44030$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com...

Excel spreadsheet? If you don't have excel, download open office.

Hello Rich,

Oh, you can get a bitmap. Things is, to create really equidistant rastering in Paint can be a pain.

Maybe I'll just do that. But I'll experiment for myself a little. Just a matter of pride, ya know...

Regards, Joerg

I've been using Gnuplot for making pretty graphs for reports and helping out a colleague with graphs in his book. If you can describe your waveforms as equations and/or table data, you can make some pretty spiffy graphs. Allows many types of outputs such as terminal display, EMF, Postscript, PNG, HPGL, and lots more. If you decide to go this route, I have a Windoze batch file that may be of interest if you need to deal with many plots.

Hello Mark,

Thanks for the hint. I read the docs a bit and it seems to be strictly command line driven. I like that but this means a long learning curve. But I did find that one fellow newsgroup poster from Europe was a contributor. Interesting.

Regards, Joerg

Another thought is Matlab or some other math program with nice graphing features.

You can create a simple Gnuplot graph in a couple minutes after installing the program. It took me many hours/days to figure out all ways to control the damn plotting, annotation and formatting. I have a text editor open and just drag and drop the file from Explorer on the Gnuplot window for instant gratification. Once you figure this program out, you will find many uses like doing a GPIB dump and plotting the results, perhaps with some smoothing, all via a batch file. For documentation, I like using EMF files since they scale nicely in word processors and PDF documents.

A simple example showing some of the basic features:

# Simple Gnuplot example reset set term windows "Arial" 10 set grid set xtics 90 set style line 1 lt 8 lw 2 set xrange [0:360] set yrange [-10:10] set dummy angle plot tan(angle*pi/180.0) linestyle 1

Are you aware of this piece of free software? -->

It's great... we use it with an old 8753C network analyzer and a few spectrum analyzers to get screen dumps into 'nice' documentation (Word files).

Yup.

Hello Mark,

GPIB dump? Now that would be cool. Most of the lab gear only works with these dreaded HP inkjets, other gear dumps raw data without any printer support.

Sometimes I cheat and snap a screen picture with the digital camera. But a GPIB dump sure would look nicer.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Joel,

Thanks. That looks great. Is it by the same John Miles who sometimes posts here?

Regards, Joerg