I've typed timing diagrams into software comments before. ASCII can be pretty expressive. Hard to do is to show arrows indicating cause and effect which sometimes is used. Harder yet is making changes. Text editors aren't very good for this.
I remember a guy in one of these groups some years back who was working on a stand alone timing diagram tool. He initially made it free, but I think he eventually had some small price on it. Can't recall any info that would help find it.
I think the guy started out thinking it was not a hard problem but kept finding that each level of added feature had an added level of difficulty in adding it.
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Rick C
Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms,
I thought you learned enough VHDL to write code? You can describe the waveforms in VHDL easily, parametrically even and view them by running the simulation. The simulators I use don't provide exactly the same sort of drawings as are often used for timing diagrams. For example, the transitions in timing diagrams usually show a rise time rather than an abrupt edge, simulations don't. Timing diagrams usually show a range of time for a transition by multiple rising/falling edges during the time window, simulations show a single transition.
In other words, a simulation display is not really a great timing diagram as they are usually drawn.
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Rick C
Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms,
On Fri, 01 Dec 2017 16:20:07 -0800, John Larkin wrote:
The LT Spice thing is a different way to look at timing diagrams. It becomes a cartoon simulation of the actual board, just enough to make the waveform diagrams. But I can use parts, like pulse generators and delay lines and maybe some logic gates, to help make the waveforms. It's an after-the-fact simulation with many of the timings derived from measuring a working board. Not necessarily useful for design but good long-term documentation.
One nice thing is that I could have 50 nodes available for plotting, any number selected and stacked the way some interested person wants to see them. Spice has live cursor readout and delta-t display, so they can measure any timing relationship they like.
And it's free, and everyone already knows how to use it.
I use Visio for simple block diagrams, to go in Word docs, but I think it would be a major pain to use for a complex timing diagram. See my other post about using LT Spice.
I do like to draw on d-size vellum with a good pencil.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
I think that is the guy who posted in some of the newsgroups maybe 10 years ago. I see he has a Google group to provide support. I recall tracking him down and his site indicated they would start charging a nominal fee once it reaches version 1.0... after some years it still isn't 1.0, lol. But it seems to be usable.
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Rick C
Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms,
I use LT spice because it is free and functional, not because it has a good UI or because it is flexible and easy to use. Heck, I don't use it often and have to go back to learning mode every time I want to work with it. Some aspects are so cryptic I have to spend more time learning the tool... again... than I do designing the circuit usually. So picking it up to do timing diagrams is a bit of a stretch for me.
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Rick C
Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms,
And yet they still seem to keep coming back. SVG is pretty pervasive these days (chances are, any diagram you run into on Wikipedia is SVG), and it's nothing but plaintext. XML (SVG is basically XML anyway), JSON and more dominate the internet, and are all plaintext based. Seems so ancient... ;-)
Now, SVG /editors/ with handy interfaces and higher level macros, that's where you want to be...
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