Here's an idea that might be worth tossing around.

I just spent about six months writing the firmware for an embedded controller board. It receives serial commands from a host computer and controls a whole bunch of motors and pumps and valves and power supplies and whatnot. It also monitors about a dozen or so A/D channels and another dozen or so digital inputs to determine the system's status and make sure that the controlled equipment is operating correctly. There is nothing that happens very fast, but there is enough asynchronous activity that the timing of various events is important and sometimes confusing.

To help me sort everything out, especially when something unexpected occurs, the firmware uses a spare serial port to continuously report the system status and also various events when they occur. It sends all this information to a PC in the form of simple, human-readable messages. The PC adds a timestamp to each one and then just writes it to a log file. Then when something goes haywire, I can go back and search through the log with my trusty text editor and/or grep and/or little ad hoc Awk scripts.

This all works fine, but I got to thinking how nifty it would be to have a program on the PC that would parse the log file and display the various system parameters and events graphically, sort of like a logic analyzer or an n-channel 'scope would. A highly evolved version of such a program would let you select which channels you wanted to display, scroll around and zoom in and out timewise, provide cursors to measure times between events, etc., etc., etc.

So the first question is: Has somebody done this already? There are tons of data loggers and chart recorder simulators out there that are kind of a step in the right direction, but everything I've stumbled across so far is set up to take its input from physical sensors connected directly to the PC. It seems like some of these would have to be able to save incoming data in a file and then analyze it later. So maybe the easy solution would just be to figure out the file format for an existing program that has the right kind of display capability, and then write (future) firmware to supply its status information in that format.

Does any of this make sense? Do you know of an existing product that does what I'm talking about?

-- Russ