QAlert Component -- A Proof Of Concept

QSPICE
1

Sometimes, I have a long-running simulation. I don’t want to sit there and watch until it completes…

QAlert pops up a system-modal window when a simulation run completes and beeps annoyingly until you dismiss it.

At this point, it’s a Proof Of Concept, merely a test of one of many possible approaches and not at all a finished tool or complete drop-in component.

If you think this might be useful, you can check out the QAlert POC stuff on the dev branch of my QSpice GitHub repository.

Do let me know if you think that this project is worth finishing. Suggestions for improved functionality are, of course, welcome.

–robert

2 Likes
2

I like it. Would fun to see if someone has a schematic capture that takes a while to run, the ones I’ve played around with go pretty quickly.

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@RDunn ,

Right now I do something very similar.

My long sims are run in a .bat file. This allows me significantly speed up the sim by eliminating the the in-line plotting of the results.

In the .bat file I call a system sound to be played once when the sim completes.

You recommend an alert that constantly sounds until the user comes to stop it. This would be a problem for me. Some of my sims can that 10 to 32+ hours. The sim might complete in the middle of the night. This would be very annoying to all people in the building who are probably trying to sleep. In this case, I probably wouldn’t be able to wake up since I would have a knife plunged into my heart by my wife.

Suggestion for your program: Alert Options

  • Constant Sound alert.
  • Sound Alert for 3 seconds every “x” minutes
  • Sound Alert once only.
  • If a LED is available to blink, constant blinking. Sound Alert optional.
  • Advanced option: Bluetooth comm feedback to your Smart phone with an App.

Len

4

Hi, Len.

All of those are doable. As is, you could turn off the speaker before going to be to avoid those unsightly and inconvenient stab wounds. :wink:

The current POC has an annoying limitation: It blocks until the alert window is closed. So, if you ran the simulation from a batch file and the batch file did some post-processing, QSpice doesn’t actually finish and return control to the batch file so that post-processing wouldn’t complete.

To overcome this annoyance, I’m working on a separate stand-alone “TCP server” that a component can communicate with without blocking. This will open up just about anything that one could think of.

Anyway, I’m just curious if folk would be interested. Thanks for the ideas.

–robert