jeremiah-c-leary / design-explorer Goto Github PK

What is the purpose of this project? Do you plan to make a graphical program to explore the design, hierarchy etc. of a HDL projects?

Instead of writing out the two CSV files and launch Gephi to manually import them, Gephi has a command line interface. It would be better to create a gephi project from the command line so I can skip the import step.

The interface class is in design_explorer.hdl.interface.
It should be moved to design_explorer.interface.
Then it could be re-used by design_explorer.hw.component.

The project is current at a D rating for maintainability.
Refactor to increase maintainability.

The ability to define nodes and subnodes allows us to "expand" a node into it's subnodes. This will allow us to define the entire system and generate diagrams at any level, or combination of levels.

The port class is in design_explorer.hdl.port.
It should be moved to design_explorer.port.
Then it could be re-used by design_explorer.hw.component.

This will allow a component to be added in a single line.

oComponent = oSystem.add…component(hw…lib.dac.create(‘DAC’))

If it is desired to have easy access to the component just added to the system.

Each component as it is created needs to be named.

The current method involves requesting an interface name using object.get_interface_named().
This leads to really long lines that obscures what is being requested.

oConnection3 = de.connection.create('discrete inputs', oDiscretes.get_interface_named('Output Discretes'), oFpga.get_interface_named('Input Discretes'))

I propose using the following method:

oConnection3 = de.connection.create('discrete inputs', 'discretes.Output Discretes', 'fpga.Input Discretes')

The item before the dot is the name of the object the interface resides on.
The item after the dot is the name of the interface.

The create method would then call the get_interface_named method and would also have to search for the object named. This will require adding another method to find the object.

We need some way to connect interfaces between objects.

The shortened form of design_explorer will make importing command shorter. There may be other benefits.

It would seem to be a good idea to automatically deep copy any interfaces added to a component.
Otherwise the same interface object will exist in multiple places.

Need to think about this.

It currently uses the edge name, but should use the interface name.

The extract function processes the components attribute in the order in which the items were added. This could cause issues if they are not ordered correctly.