What are some intuitive ways to visually show communication packets between several devices, as well as general debug information?
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I have setup consisting of several devices that can communicate through high-speed buses. The following devices exist: A. 1 grandparent. B. The grandparent has 5 children. I will denote these the parents. C. Each parent has 1 child. I will denote these the children. The grandparent can talk directly to the parents and the parents can talk directly to the grandparent and their own child. Furthermore, the grandparent can also talk to its grandchilden, but it needs to do so via the parent and likewise, the children can talk to the grandparent, but needs to go through its parent. I need to visualize in a table (C# DataGridView) how packets are going back and forth and make it easy to understand what's going on in the system at any given time. All devices has a debug UART and I can modify the source code in all the devices to get the debug messages I need. I'm currently writing a terminal application that can handle several COM ports. I was thinking that the grandparent always logs its data with 0 indentation, parent 1 logs with 4 spaces indentation, parent 2 logs with 8 spaces indentation, etc. Then I was thinking about showing the same packet as it progresses through the chain in the same color everywhere. Whenever a log message contains the word error, then I will display that row in red. If something is purely information, but not a packet, then I was thinking about showing that with a specific pattern style (similar to Excel "Format Cell" -> "Fill" -> "Pattern Style"). Does anybody have any comments or suggestions on this? Is there something I can google image search to get some inspiration?
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I have setup consisting of several devices that can communicate through high-speed buses. The following devices exist: A. 1 grandparent. B. The grandparent has 5 children. I will denote these the parents. C. Each parent has 1 child. I will denote these the children. The grandparent can talk directly to the parents and the parents can talk directly to the grandparent and their own child. Furthermore, the grandparent can also talk to its grandchilden, but it needs to do so via the parent and likewise, the children can talk to the grandparent, but needs to go through its parent. I need to visualize in a table (C# DataGridView) how packets are going back and forth and make it easy to understand what's going on in the system at any given time. All devices has a debug UART and I can modify the source code in all the devices to get the debug messages I need. I'm currently writing a terminal application that can handle several COM ports. I was thinking that the grandparent always logs its data with 0 indentation, parent 1 logs with 4 spaces indentation, parent 2 logs with 8 spaces indentation, etc. Then I was thinking about showing the same packet as it progresses through the chain in the same color everywhere. Whenever a log message contains the word error, then I will display that row in red. If something is purely information, but not a packet, then I was thinking about showing that with a specific pattern style (similar to Excel "Format Cell" -> "Fill" -> "Pattern Style"). Does anybody have any comments or suggestions on this? Is there something I can google image search to get some inspiration?
I don't know what limitations you face when displaying this, but a message sequence chart[^] might work. I generate simple ASCII versions of them in a session processing framework that I developed, and I was impressed by this article[^], which might help you generate professional looking ones.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
I don't know what limitations you face when displaying this, but a message sequence chart[^] might work. I generate simple ASCII versions of them in a session processing framework that I developed, and I was impressed by this article[^], which might help you generate professional looking ones.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
