What is Ghost?
Ghost is a new technology which, when combined with Flowcode, provides a revolutionary way of debugging electronic systems.
Ghost technology provides a real time log of the status of all the pins on the microcontroller whilst a Flowcode program is running on the device. Ghost data can be viewed on the Flowcode Softscope at the same time as the flow chart simulation. We call this ‘In-Circuit-Test’. You can run, pause, and step through, your program and view Ghost data at the same time and view variables, registers and other memory locations. We call this ‘In-Circuit-Debug’
When this data is combined with the PC-side processing capabilities of Flowcode it provides a very powerful debugging and learning tool. As an example of this the 5 steps below show how ICT works to collect a stream of GPS digital data gathered from the E-blocks system and processed into layers of meaningful information to help the design process.
This saves huge amounts of development time - whether you are working at a pin level and getting your first program to work, or whether you are an advanced user wanting to perform a sanity check to make sure communications baud rates are set at the correct speed.
Both analogue and digital data is gathered through Ghost ICT and displayed on the Flowcode Softscope. For communications busses decoding overlays for UART, SPI, and I2C are available. Ghost data can also be passed to simulation/SCADA components in Flowcode to provide Human Machine Interface style debug features.
Flowcode screen showing real time digital and analogue in circuit test (ICT) data being shown via the data recorder and oscilloscope windows. The data recorder showing data over a period of time and the oscilloscope showing repeating waveforms using edge triggering.