Multipage designs

[GDSever]

I have a somewhat rudimentary question that I have not found an answer for yet - Lets say you have a design that spans more than one page... For example I have one page that contains the core wiring, and a second page that has all of the LEDs and switches. For some reason, if I start the simulation on the core page, flipping the switches on the second page has absolutely no effect on the main page components. Likewise, if I start the simulation on the page with the switches and LEDs, none of the components on the main page update themselves.

So what am I missing? Do I need to do something special for designs that span more than one page? Is it possible to tie the two together?

 

[Technical]

You do need to join nets together - ie have a terminal point named 'my_input1' on the first page connected to the switch net and a matching terminal point called 'my_input1' connected to the picaxe input pin on the second page.

 

[GDSever]

I thought I had done that adequately. I'm attaching a couple of screenshots to better illustrate my point... sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and all that jazz.

First screenshot is of the switch & sensor page, and you'll notice that all of the nets are marked as high / low / floating with the red / blue / gray boxes, as expected. When I manipulate the switches, everything seems to work as expected (including the components & PICAXE code that runs on the main page)... however when you switch over to the main page of the design...

Second screenshot is of the main page. Notice that there is only one net that has its state box - serout (pin 28) on on the PICAXE component. All the other nets appear to be completely dead... This also means that if I change a value on the LM34 component on the main page, it does not seem to register to the PICAXE... The simulation basically behaves like everything on the main page is not included.

The more dramatic example is when you run the simulation while on the main page and switch over to the second one. Throwing switches, etc. does not do anything to the simulation at all, and none of the indicators (LEDs) on the second page respond.

Ideas where I could be going wrong? I can post the DSN and BAS file if that would help.

 

[ArnieW]

none of the components on the main page update themselves.

Hi Garrett,

I've experienced the same thing. I've spanned circuits over two pages such as a transmitter picaxe on one page and receiver/decoder on another. Each page works ok on its own, but switching between pages doesn't.

I created workarounds by cramming things together on one page, but it is not the best solution.

 

[GDSever]

Sounds like its not just me... guess we should wait for Technical to come back to us and see if he's got more advice, or if I should upload the .BAS and .DSN files.

Fortunately the critical stuff is all together on the individual pages, so I can make due... Still very inconvenient though.

 

[Labcenter]

This is currently a limitation in the animation (not the simulation). That is, you can simulate multi-sheet designs but animation effects will only operate on the foreground sheet at the point the simulation is initialised.

Originally, we had assumed this logical on the basis that the interface elements of a design could be present on the first root sheet with other, non-interactive circuitry on background sheets. However, over time this scheme has become insufficient in some cases (and can be confusing with, for example, logic indicators on pins). It is something that is on our list for dev to look at, although I don't have a timescale ATT.

Iain.

 

[GDSever]

Thank you for the reply - Good information to have. I wasn't aware of this limitation and had not seen it documented as part of the help file, although it may be there.

We can certainly try to plan our sheets accordingly until such time that the software is upgraded to fully accomodate multiple pages.