Target trace

The event tracing feature when executing on target hardware may help you to understand what exactly is happening on your target, but it is not the full blown animation you can use in your Windows environment IBM Rational has implemented that using a TCP/IP stack and instrumented code. The instrumentation would bloat your code and interfere with the real time behavior.

Instead, Willert Software Tools has implemented a tracing on target in the form of a tiny event log mechanism, which information is interpretated on a host PC for visualization. The increase in footprint is minimal: only a few words of data and some instructions. The output of the trace is converted in a form of animation.

Currently, we can offer this tracing when executing on the target hardware for products based on ARM and the Keil RealView toolchain only. Please contact our sales department at +49 5722 9678 60 for any questions or inquiries for availability.

There are two kinds of animation when tracing on the target hardware:

live animation. You can use this in two distinct ways:

while the application is running on the target hardware, you can see a live trace output which is shown in a simple statechart.
you can stop the live visualization of the tracing, which will automatically import the data into Rhapsody where its sequence diagram is displayed. Next you can compare it with a designed sequence diagram.

offline animation. In this case specific events are stored in a circular buffer which allows you to take a sample in the field when your application is active in production.

Trace for Live Animation

As an example, we show you the simulation of a GPIO1 Port in a Blinky example using Keil µVision:

Now you can see the events sent in the trace window and sequence diagram window outside of Rhapsody:

When you press Halt

in the simulator, you will halt the execution. Next, when you press OK in the WST Live Event View window, the data is automatically imported into Rhapsody and shown as a sequence diagram which you can compare with a designed one:

Trace for Offline Animation

Offline is particular useful for taking a snapshot of a running target in the field: you connect your debugger and a circular buffer of specified events is read, which can be shown in Rhapsody.

The events which are sent between the objects are fed back into Embedded UML Studio using the JTAG interface on your hardware. The events are automatically converted into an XMI file, which is read by Rhapsody resulting in a Sequence Diagram.

You can compare the target behavior Sequence Diagram with a Sequence Diagram you created in the analysis phase or that was recorded during animation on the host platform:

This allows you also to verify requirements specified as scenarios and even fast regression tests.

The offline animation has been implemented for the ARM OO RTX solution using the KEIL toolchain. As debugger you may use µVision 3 by KEIL or the pls Universal Debug Engine (UDE) which offers an innovative JTAG interface with injected instructions so the ARM does not need to be stopped.