TODO

sigrok 0.1 release-critical issues

sigrok 0.1 comprises only sigrok-cli, i.e. GUI and protocol decoders are not part of the release.

• Ensure that segfaults are rare / non-existing in CLI. Use code reviews and valgrind or similar to check.
• Windows port
  • At least a working sigrok-cli with the demo driver is required.
  • Implement anykey.c replacement.
• Update sigrok-cli man page.
  • Document --continuous option.
  • Document --input-file option.
  • Add examples of basic usage with -o samplerate.
• Make sure all output modules handle unknown DF types gracefully (problem in event handlers)
• Temporarily remove non-functional options from CLI
  • PDs
  • session saving/loading
• cli: pack list of drivers, modules etc into one option which displays all of those. Update manpage accordingly.
• libsigrok, libsigrokdecode: Proper shared libs setup and version numbers to be able to handle API/ABI compatibility issues sanely later.
• Ensure that "make distcheck" works fine, and that you can build sigrok using that generated tarball (i.e. no missing files etc).
• Make sure all output formats work OK and there are no segfaults.
  • Test that they're not corrupted by stray errors printed on stdout instead of stderr.
  • Test all of the above without SIGROK_DEBUG, with SIGROK_DEBUG=1, and SIGROK_DEBUG=2.

sigrok 0.2 features

• support OLS file format input and output (https://github.com/jawi/ols/wiki/OLS-data-file-format)
• cli: fix save session, implement load session

General

• sigrok uses uint64_t as an internal datatype to represent a sample, limiting the number of probes on supported hardware to 64. But high-end logic analyzers can have hundreds of probes. A solution would be to switch to either a roll-our-own byte array type, or use GMP. In any case, the overhead of switching over shouldn't be too bad: the filter code and frontend datafeed callback functions will need to use it, but hardware drivers should have enough with a couple of lightweight wrappers.

libsigrok

• Fix/workaround libusb 1.0 Windows port issues:
  • Device renumeration not yet supported (needed for FX2 based LAs)
  • File descriptor / socket based polling not supported in Windows. Workaround (short-term): Use a thread in sigrok.
• Session loading from file.
• sigrok_errno:
  • Most backend functions return status as an integer, which is SIGROK_OK if all went well, or SIGROK_ERR_* and similar if an error occurred.
  • However there is no way to pass any information back as to what went wrong — and this is important for user-friendliness.
  • Perhaps an error code is not enough; maybe something like sigrok_errno(errorcode, "unsupported device") is better.
  • Both the cmdline and GUI interfaces need this, really, so it should be a backend library thing.
• Make sure all optional components are really optional in the build system:
  • Only require Python if the users wants protocol decoders, the rest should also build/compile/run fine without Python installed.
  • ...
• Add output for latex package tikz-timing

Hardware drivers

• Clean up device-specific globals in hardware drivers, to properly permit multiple devices per driver.

Open-source firmware for the FX2 devices

The Cypress FX2-based devices, such as the Saleae Logic and the USBee SX, use only a minimal vendor-provided firmware. The only thing it really does is set the sample rate and turn on the chip's auto-mode. Nevertheless, the vendors provide the firmware as a binary blob, with no source.

It would be great if sigrok could ship with an own firmware implementation for these devices. Some links:

• SDCC, the Small Devices C Compiler, is a compiler specifically suited to small MCUs, and has support for the 8051 core in the FX2.
• fx2lib is an open-source library for writing firmware on the FX2. It has a number of interesting functions, including implementing custom USB vendor commands.
• GNU Radio's USRP2 board has an FX2 on it, and GNU Radio has extensive custom firmware for it.

Windows installer

• Add support for downloading/installing the Python Windows installer.