Schlenter

The two applications under this heading are known as DAQPAK (Data AQuisition PAcKage) and MAST (Manual and Automatic Scheduling Tool) respectively.

Purpose of application

(a) A program to read an A/D converter connected to some strain gauges and plot some cute pictures of stress vs. strain as rocks are crushed - the code contains a cute circular buffer based interrupt routines (commercial).

(b) A manual and automatic scheduling tool that uses a modified list scheduling heuristic and user interaction to schedule tasks from a block diagram onto a multiprocessor transputer hardware platform - the code produces cute postscript gantt charts (Masters project).

Distribution category

(a) Commercial and site specific; (b) academic and project specific.

Availability

The author advised that he was not sure if he is allowed to distribute the code of either (a) or (b) or whether he would want to since neither is particularly cleanly written or useful to mankind outside of the environment for which it was produced.

Description of application

See statement above.

Developmental problems and response

The programs were too large for DOS mode. Debug under TD and had to run it under Pharlap to be able to debug it. The author had a messy problem getting the main program to update entries in the dialog box listbox and communicating in the other direction.

Reason for choosing Turbo Vision

The author stated that Turbo Vision was far less resource hungry than Windows and required less spectacular hardware to run. Also a GUI was not required for the applications written.

Contact

Craig Schlenter University of Natal <cschle@daisy.ee.und.ac.za>